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.
Wistful, melancholy and sadly incomplete, “A Case of Blue” wanders into a new retiree’s drift into his past as a way of owning up to a present he’s checked out of.
It’s a fine showcase for its stars, but a little frustrating to grapple with because of all it leaves out in its 80 downbeat minutes.
Richard, played by dulcet-voiced TV veteran Stephen Schnetzer (“Another World,” various “Law & Orders”), gets a surprise party on the day he retires from his accounting job, and lots of looks of concern from his wife (Tracy Shayne) and daughter (Ursula Abbott) when he gets home.
“Stop pretending to be the Rock of Gibraltar,” his wife complains. Their concern seems more a plot contrivance than anything we can see on his face or in his behavior. But like all retirees, Richard needs something to focus on. That’s why his daughter gave him the gift of life drawing classes with a New York college. He wanted to be an artist before he settled on a “career” and a more normal life.
The classes give him deja vu from the start. They’re in the same studio where he studied as a teen some 50 years before, with the same “one minute pose” exercises. And then there’s the day an exotic beauty comes in to model for them.
Richard is literally slack-jawed when (Annapurna Sriram of “In Case of Emergency” and TV’s “The Black List”) disrobes. She’s the spitting image of his first great love, also an artist’s model, from back in his student days.
When she sees how he’s drawing her — “That’s not how I posed” — she’s a little freaked out. Richard wonders if he’s imagining this seeming rift in time. His old work pal (Ken Baltin) figures this is “some serious ‘Twilight Zone’ s–t!”
Richard isn’t subtle when he tries to find out her name when she abruptly stops posing for the class. He stalks her via a poster she hung up for a folk singer friend scheduled to perform at New York’s famed Cafe Wha, still a folk venue as it was when Richard was young.
They kick him out when she sets eyes on him. It’s only when he risks getting punched by her date (Jay Devore) that enough information is exchanged to explain some of what’s going on. Her name is Amelia. He must have been in love with her grandmother, Marcy.
“You know how creepy this is, right?”
A “relationship,” of sorts, begins between the retiree from New Jersey’s Volvo suburbs and the NoHo/SoHo “Bohemian” Amelia, an artist herself and a “magnet” for Washington Square Park “misfit” lads from art, music, Wall Street or wherever.
Writer-director Dana H. Glazer (“Intermezzo,” and the documentaries “Parents of the Revolution” and “The Evolution of Dad”) lays out expectations of a late life crisis drama/male wish fulfillment fantasy and wisely sets out to upend those expectations.
But the “creepy” vibe isn’t disarmed with the vivacious Amelia’s wisecrack, and Richard’s decision to join her and her entourage for a costume party in a club is merely a showcase for “old guy in the club” jabs.
“Don’t set off your Life Alert bracelet!” “Why aren’t you at the nursing home?”
Amelia’s motivations — either as real-life temptation or imagined life-crisis fantasy — are never made clear.
And Richard’s “journey” seems stumbling, abrupt and missing a few steps — make that SEVERAL steps — on the road from “lost since retirement” to “purpose.”
The players make “A Case of Blue” pleasant enough to sit through, but the movie plays like an appetizer that never amounts to more than an appeteaser.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Stephen Schnetzer, Annapurna Sriram, Tracy Shayne, Jay Devore and Ken Baltin
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana H. Glazer. A 1091 release.
There was a stretch back in the ’90s and early 2000s when every American network sitcom did an episode or two about how to get “out of the ‘friend zone.'”
So think of the French rom-com “Friendzone” as “Friends” with less coffee and more nudity, and in French. Because I sure did.
This time-killer of a romance has a touching moment or…OK, there’s just one. And there’s a laugh or two. Yes. Two, one of them a fake-out when we think a character’s been killed off. Because THAT would be edgy.
But no. There’s nothing about this Around the World With Netflix outing that doesn’t seem as familiar as a “Scrubs” rerun, with even the nudity playing “A Shot in the Dark” games with the whole “caught skinny dipping on a nude-friendly beach” bit.
Mickaël Lumière (“Mon Bebe,” aka “Sweetheart”) stars as Titi, a male nurse we meet as he joins his girlfriends/fellow nurses (Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult) for a bachelorette party weekend on the Riviera.
They’re free spirits, confident, beautiful women who join the crowd at their resort in ditching their bikinis and hitting the water. Titi? He’s a bit of a lump of the “I’m going to read a little and go to bed” (in French with English sutbitles, or dubbed) type.
Still, the water looks inviting, so after everybody else has gone, he strips, takes a dip and gets into a predicament with the gorgeous Rose (Eva Danino). She steps on a Weever fish, he knows how to help because he’s a nurse. And yet, he’s buck naked and “It’s too complicated to explain.”
Still, he nurses her, gets her back to her room, and…doesn’t take advantage of her obvious pleasure at being cared for, massaged and what not.
They get together again back in the city, and she seems to enjoy his company, likes joking around about what they’ll name their children after.
She’s a children’s fashion entrepreneur, so he goes shopping with her. They Netflix movies as he gives her foot massages and she whines about her jerk of an ex.
But let Titi — short for Thibault — show up well-dressed with thoughts of romance and see what happens.
“A date?” “Oui.” With who?” “You!” Ok then, but did you bring condoms? Before he can admit that he did, she bursts out laughing. “Wouldn’t THAT be CRAZY?”
He is in the “friend zone,” which at least sounds prettier in French (zone amie).
“It’s SYSTEMIC with you,” he’s scolded.
Good thing he’s got this hot trio of ladyfriends to help him change that. They propose a bit of coaching, tell him to lie about leaving the country for a bit so that he can hit “restart” on their relationship. Let the “makeover montages set to music” begin.
Maud (Azem) is the perfectly-conditioned lesbian getting him into shape and instructing him how to sexually please a woman. Lulu (Camara) will drag him to her dance classes. Alex (Arnoult) will work on his attitude.
“You’re not some doormat!” “You talk way too much!” “No laughing!” “Ambiguity is the key to intimacy.”
They give him a test run, send him up to a bar to hit on this lovely woman there, and his blunt, laid-back vibe clicks.
“I’m normally a saint. I don’t drink or smoke. I work in social services (he’s a nurse in a pediatric hospital). And no sex on the first date.”
That’s all it takes to land the digits and the interest of “The French Kardashian,” the sexy and quirky French influencer Jennifer (Eloïse Valli).
But wouldn’t you know it, Rose has gone back to he jerk record-producer ex (Maxime Gasteuil) while all this is going on.
The makeover montages are generic in the extreme, the pop selected here ranges from a synth-loaded club mix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” and Machiavel’s “Fly.”
The slapstick, what little there is of it, works. Jenni’s appetite for sex, seriously high-end cuisine and selfie’s is worth half a chuckle.
But “Friendzone” flatlines for long stretches as it meanders towards the classic rom-com finale.
Use it as colorful background noise or to brush up on your French dating slang, because that’s all it’s good for.
Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sexual situations
Cast: Mickaël Lumière, Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult, Eva Danino, Maxime Gasteuil and Eloïse Valli
Credits: Directed by Charles Van Tieghem, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Charles Van Tieghem. A Netflix release.
A tangled, convoluted and over-explained horror tale, “The Secret of Sinchanee” goes kind of wrong — dare I say it? — from its opening title.
If you need a full page of credits explaining an ancient blood feud between a mixed-race Indian tribe, the Sinchanee,” and a pagan cult hell that wanted to “eradicate the bloodline,” and never quite succeeded but still haunts this corner of snowy Massachusetts all these centuries later, you’re already buried in script clutter before a single scene plays out.
The feature directing debut from writer/director/star Steven Grayhm takes forever to get going as he struggles to tie together that age-old battle with events from a troubled guy’s childhood and his haunted, murder-investigated present-day.
And all this third act shouting and over-acting (at least they’re “acting”) by the two cops (Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer) on the case doesn’t translate into “exciting.”
Will (Grayhm) has just lost his father. And because of an infamous crime decades before, the family house out in the woods of Deerfield just won’t sell.
Will has trouble with nightmares and visions, things he saw as a child that relate somehow to weird occurrences hitting him now.
The spooky piano player tells him to “return it to its rightful place,” meaning a talisman he acquired long ago.
And the cops? They’re digging into his involvement from Will’s childhood that might tie him to the murder of somebody he used to know.
All this connects to the Sinchanee, the “new” tribe of intermarried Natives and white settlers, and the cultish Atlantow, who vowed to wipe them out. Somehow. I mean, the facepaint gives that away.
The film spends over an hour showing Will slowly — oh-so-slowly– cracking up at the strain, the cops looking at old interrogation footage from “The Starke/Cotter Murders” case long ago and people wandering in the snow, searching in the snow, finding a body in the snow.
The odd arresting candlelit sequence, fireside shadow scare show bit or attempted chase doesn’t add up to a two hour movie.
The director/star deemed that Will looking for his missing dog was worth 15 minutes of screen time, so you can see what we’re up against here.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer, Laila Lockhart Kraner and Rudy Reyes.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Steven Grayhm. A Vertical release.
