John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” with a mixture of outrage and pity, a novel with a stark, almost Biblical warning embedded in every page.
John Ford’s classic film leans towards the sentimental, but he kept some of Steinbeck’s fury — just enough to make this, in my mind, the only Labor Day movie that matters.
We romanticize the past, and nobody was better at that than Ford. But in 1939, he was making a movie in the latter stages of a global financial crisis and the tail end of a national disaster — the Dust Bowl. He couldn’t have known this movie would stand the test of time and earn rebroadcasts every year when we kick back, crack open a cold one and forget what Labor Day was all about. He made a movie about his “present,” with oppression and predatory capitalism and widespread intense poverty and hardship, people starving while others lived lives as far removed from that as escapist screwball comedy millionaires.
I remember bawling my eyes out when my family watched it on TV as a child. But sentiment and tragedy aside, here’s what I’m taking away from watching it again this Labor Day.
We can’t confer sainthood on everyone who lived through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that just made it worse.
Steinbeck’s book and Ford’s film reminds us there were plucky survivors and sad-eyed cynics who just gave up. There were good Samaritans and folks without a hint of pity for another person’s struggle.
We’ve always had an awful, self serving or self-deluded minority struggling to keep The People down.
There were miserly oligarchs who exploited a bad situation with no compunction or humanity. And there were always cops — state police and their heartless cheerleaders (right wing mobs) of the day — willing to back up the monied and keep “The People” in their place.
“What’d you do in the first place?”
“I talked back.”
Timely? Timeless. That what a movie that still has something to say to viewers 81 years after it’s release is.
Worth chewing on as you’re moved by Ma Joad’s (Jane Darwell) plight, that of her boy Tom (Henry Fonda), the very human, “touched” and Christ-like Jim Crasy (John Carradine) and everyone else we see in this film, crafted in a way that has haunted generations who knew something of the want depicted in it, and generations griping about having to wait on their delayed iPhone to come in.
“Wife of a Spy” doesn’t traffic in most of the tropes of the espionage thriller. The espionage takes place off-camera. There are no shootouts, and the closest thing to a chase is a bit of the old “I think we’re being followed.”
Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s understated thriller is about trust and how it is the ultimate test of a couple’s connection, about the seemingly simple but fraught logistics of plotting an escape from a fascist police state, and about feeling morally out of step with your homeland.
Considering Japan’s long history of cinematic World War II denialism — the days when a movie like “The Last Emperor” or any film related to “The Rape of Nanjing” were banned — it’s a remarkably frank film that gets at the heart of questioning nationalism in general and “My country, right or wrong” in particular.
Yû Aoi has the title role, that of Satoko, the trusting, adoring wife of Yusaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi). He’s a Kobe fabrics importer/exporter, and the film opens with the arrest of a British business associate of his.
“What has Japan become?” the portly Brit protests. It’s 1940, and at least for the moment, Japan isn’t at war with any Western country.
A childhood friend Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), now an officer in military counter-intelligence, stops by and ever-so-politely confronts Yusako with his association with the accused.
“You must choose your friends,” he warns (in Japanese, with English subtitles). “Times are changing.”
In the streets of Kobe, on the docks — everywhere it seems — formations of troops are parading or marching off to ship overseas, to China, which Japan invaded years before, or to Indochina. Japan forces France to allow it to occupy the French colony after Dunkirk.
The people crowd the streets as they pass chanting “Banzai!” But not Yusako. A wiry, confident man of means, he strikes us as a cool customer. No, this British fellow isn’t a spy, he laughs.
At home, Yusaku films himself, Satoko and his nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) in short, silent melodramas using his Pathe 9.5 mm camera. They show these arty potboilers to their friends.
But Yusaku is cagey, and there’s a distance between him and his submissive but more Westernized and thus less passive wife. She’s concerned about his travel plans to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the “Settlers’ Paradise” that Japan renamed Manchukuo and which its Kwantung Army runs, encouraging Japanese immigration in the creation of what their fascist friend Hitler would later call “living space.”
Yusaku’s blather about “opportunities” there placate Satoko. Or do they? And when he returns, he’s even cagier than before. He’s seen things, awful things.
She fears for her marriage, and her mutual friendship with the suspicious Taiji plants further seeds of doubt. Is she the wife of a spy?
The conflicts here are mostly conflicting loyalties, and Aoi and Takashi manage a brittle, careful couples’ waltz around what he might be doing and her thoughts about his close association with a Brit, and plans to travel to America, which he saw, briefly, as a sailor years before.
“But they’re our enemies,” she protests. Not his, he insists. “I’m a cosmopolitan!”
That pose grates a bit in an era where bigshots of business around the world are pursuing pan-national agendas and acting without regard to “national interests.” But with the ggift of hindsight and guessing what Yusaku has learned, we buy in.
Will Sakoto?
The screenplay sets up expectations, and then sets out to upend them. We’re invited to over-estimate one spouse and underestimate the other. We see the bond grow as they scramble to turn their Yen into “metal” — jewelry you can take on a trip, one that might be permanent.
Kurosawa — “Tokyo Sonata” is still his best-known film in the West (and no, he’s not related to Akira Kurosawa) — tries to tell an expansive, saga-length story on a budget, taking the characters on into World War II. That leads to anticlimactic moments in what plays as an epilogue that rather dull the impact of the film’s true climax.
Similar movies set in Germany (“13 Minutes,” “Sophie Scholl”) managed far more suspense and pathos.
And the English speaking bit players seriously let down the film. I could round up more convincing actors at any regional theater in America.
But Kurosawa has made a period piece with believable characters and intrigues that generally avoid melodrama. The stakes are human-scaled and deathly personal. And the script and players ensure that we ride out the same conflicting loyalties and emotions that they do, forcing ourselves into their shoes and never letting hindsight give us an easy way out.
“Aftermath” is a sluggish, convoluted domestic horror thriller that can’t be rescued by a fierce turn by its leading lady, “Twilight” alumna Ashley Greene.
If you can make it to the ridiculously drawn-out and absurd finale — and Rotten Tomatoes has its running time wrong, it’s close to two hours — you’ll witness a good actress giving her all even when things go from straining credulity to nonsense.
Greene plays Natalie, a clothing designer struggling to get her marriage to Kevin (Shawn Ashmore of TV’s “The Rookie” and “The Ruins” and “Darkness Falls”) back on track after a “betrayal.”
They’re in counseling.
She’s struggling to get her designer dress shop open. He’s quit college, taken up working with a biohazard crime-scene cleanup team (Travis Coles and Jamie Kaler) prone to making wisecracks about a suicide victim creating “a Jackson Pollock on the wall” of their latest job.
And that’s when Kevin gets a really good deal on a house. That suicide wasn’t just a guy eating a pistol. He murdered his wife first. Despite her doubts, the fact that he didn’t consult her before starting the process, and despite the “disturbing” history of the house, Natalie goes along with this “fresh start.”
They move in, their dog starts whimpering at closed doors and bumps in the night. Because the dog ALWAYS knows. And Natalie starts seeing things and hearing other things, a “slender, pale” figure slipping into the house, using the restroom.
“Pump the BRAKES on the melodrama!” her husband barks. But he’s wondering about the strange things going on, the bizarre subscriptions that turn up at their door, the firebomb somebody tosses into their car.
Yes, I’m leaving a few others out. It’s a seriously cluttered tale, as far as excess characters are concerned.
And yes, you can tell from the extensive cast that some effort was made to trick the viewer, or at least throw us off the scent and keep us from guessing where this is going. Screenwriter Dakota Gorman tries to have her horror, and her psychological thriller, too, and doesn’t let “plausible” slow down her type-type-typing.
“Aftermath” plays around with the mistrust in the aftermath of an affair and ghosts that horror convention suggests linger in the places where their lives ended. But Gorman gets lost in trying to rationally explain all of this while losing track of all that.
A savvy viewer’s first eyerolls turn up long before Kevin’s “Pump the brakes” crack, and continue apace through the thoroughly conventional climax.
Perhaps the filmmakers’ grasp exceeded their reach, or maybe neither screenwriter nor director could see what a mess it was before the camera rolled. Either way, it’s an untidy, unfocused and unsatisfying thriller that won’t gild anybody’s resume.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity
Cast: Ashley Greene, Shawn Ashmore, Britt Baron, Sharif Atkins, Diana Hopper, Travis Coles and Jamie Kaler.
Credits: Directed by Peter Winther, scripted by Dakota Gorman. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:54
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If it’s late enough — and “Death Drop Gorgeous” is nothing if it’s not a “Midnight Movie” — and you’re tipsy enough, I suppose there might be a few giggles and grins in this death in a drag club slasher comedy.
Emphasis on “I suppose.”
Written and directed by a threesome, with amateurishly broad acting and stereotypical drag queen bitchiness interrupted by gruesomely explicit violence involving knives, a screwdriver and the last thing any man would want caught in a meat grinder, it might have looked promising on paper.
I found it all a bit much and 100 minutes of nothing at the same time.
The serial slaughter takes place in and around a Providence, Rhode Island drag club — The Out House. And who would’ve guessed Providence was this lurid? Oh. Right. Brown.
The club is run by a dese-dem-dose but LGTBQ-friendly goombah nicknamed Tony Two Fingers (Brandon Perras), with a stage that plays host/hostess to the likes of Rosebud Cianci, Lindsay Fuckingham (subtle), Tragedi, Audrey Heartburn and the queen of the hop, Janet Fitness (Matthew Pidge).
The elder-statespronoun of the parade is Gloria Hole (Michael McAdam), long in the tooth, dated in her act and despised by all.
Aspiring queen Brian (Christopher Dalpe) and close-friend and sometime bartender Dwayne (Wayne Richard) are the bystanders to all the mayhem that begins with a junkie lured into a car and callously poked with a screwdriver, his “blood drained” according to the detectives (Michael J. Ahern and Sean Murphy) assigned the case.
The funniest stuff here is the backstage dressing room digs that the queens dish out.
“If you’re gonna have two faces, at least make one of them PRETTY.” “I douched for THIS?”
Writers-directors (and co-stars) Ahern, Dalpe and Perras conceive an entire described world revolving around the drag club, with such eateries as “Papa Fagarti’s up on the hill.”
The murders — most of them humdrum, save for the bloodspurts — earn reactions of deadpan shock from those who find the bodies — “Damn, he had GREAT abs!” — and pseudo-zingers from the detectives, shaking their heads over the killer “shredding (the victim’s) meat and potatoes like that.”
Poor pacing always throws pedestrian performances into the foreground, and “Death Drop Gorgeous” is overrun with those as it plods along on ill-fitting heels.
Yes, the assorted queens have cute enough acts, and the drag shows — lip synched to original songs composed for the film — are the most professional thing in this.
But is it worth staying up for a midnight showing, spending for the drinks etc. you’d have to imbibe to dive into its vibe? Honey, no.
Rating: Unrated, graphic, gory violence, nudity, sex, profanity, drug abuse
Cast: Paul Bohn, Wayne Richard, Christopher Dalpe, Michael J. Ahern, Sean Murphy, Brandon Perras and Michael McAdam
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael J. Ahern, Christopher Dalpe and Brandon Perras. A Dark Star release.
A quiet, somber and downbeat story of 9/11 victims and efforts to get their survivors to sign onto a blanket compensation plan, “Worth” takes on “importance” thanks to its subject matter and its A-list cast.
Michael Keaton and Amy Ryan play the attorneys authorized by the Bush Administration to negotiate and recruit widows, children and other survivors to forgo lawsuits and settle for a cash payout. And Stanley Tucci plays one survivor/activist who pushed back at their number-crunching and tried to inject humanity into the considerations.
The “names” lend extra gravitas to a movie that doesn’t really need it. Their real “worth” in this Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher,””Little Accidents”) is in showing as a simple journey from officious compassion to genuine empathy. The picture and the characters portrayed are almost myopic, buttoned down and narrow in their focus to “save the airlines, etc. from lawsuits” task. These very good actors show us lawyers — some of them anyway — discovering their humanity.
Keaton plays Ken Feinberg, a rich, DC-connected lawyer who, with his partner, Camille Biros (Ryan), specializes in fending off class action suits via mass settlement schemes on big cases on everything from Agent Orange to Big Asbestos.
We meet Feinberg as he’s teaching at Georgetown Law, prodding his students into discussing “What is life worth? The question actually has an answer and that answer is a number.”
Keaton, affecting an accent that fades as the film progresses, never lets this flippant, glib lawyer slip into caricature. Feinberg’s a sharp cookie, a professional, but a man with blinders that he puts on to avoid letting any case turn “personal.” Others may attack him because “to you we’re just numbers,” and have a point. But he’s no monster.
When 9/11 happens, Ken and Camille use their connections to land the “special master” role in setting up and running a compensation commission designed to save airlines and various corners of government from the lawsuits that would, Bush, Ashcroft and assorted Republicans are sure would “wreck the economy.” The lawyers will work pro bono, because this is something they “can do to help.”
“Worth” shows the clumsy, heavy-handed first steps they take, their first meetings with victims’ families, the “dispense reasonable payments” plan that operates on a financial formula built on insurance companies’ actuarial tables. That isn’t going to fly.
“My daughter’s life is worth as much as anybody in a ‘corner office!'” “He’s just hear to shut us up so we don’t sue!”
Tucci plays Charles Wolf, who lost his wife on 9/11 and who organizes other victims in pursuit of compassion, humanity and “fairness.” Tate Donavan plays the true villain of the film, a lawyer for the rich who wants to ensure that the survivors of the rich are the ones who get the lion’s share of the payouts.
The built-in pathos of any tale of 9/11 applies here. To turn the story into something that doesn’t drown in numbers and montages of tearful interviews with widows and family, “Godzilla” screenwriter Max Borenstein focuses — somewhat — on the conflict between the deadline-oriented lawyer and the “give these people their due” and “listen to their stories” survivor/activist. To do that, he leans on the two men’s (perhaps true) shared love of opera, which is the first thing in the movie that feels trite and cliched.
“Worth” can feel ungainly, at times. The film tends to stagger through the middle and late acts as Ryan has far too little screen time as the partner who “sees the light” first, and likewise Shunori Ramanathan is given short shrift as she ably plays a new attorney who narrowly escaped being in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and is thus even more inclined to humanize what their work with still-grieving families.
I like Borenstein’s depiction of the “messy” lives that “don’t fit into the mold” that Feinberg’s formula was designed to apply — a fireman with a secret second family, a gay couple living in a state where homosexual civil unions weren’t recognized, which makes the surviving partner another “mold” breaker.
But it is the film’s stars who convey the larger message of “Worth.” We see adults with serious disagreements acting like adults, trying to ignore the “get re-elected” politics of the mostly-off-camera Bush Administration officials, and find compromises.
Sad to say that adults in positions of authority acting like adults — diplomatic, courteous — is the most refreshing historical artifact resurrected in “Worth.” There’s just enough screaming, name-calling and throwing drinks at the “blood money” lawyers to remind us that’s a lot more common in America these days.
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language (profanity) and thematic elements
Cast: Michael Keaton, Amy Ryan, Stanley Tucci, Talia Balsam, Shunori Ramanathan and Laura Benanti
Credits: Directed by Sara Colangelo, scripted by Max Borenstein. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:59
Little Accidents, The Kindergarten Teacher
Godzilla screenwriter
Rating: PG-13 for some strong language (profanity) and thematic elements
Cast: Michael Keaton, Amy Ryan, Stanley Tucci, Talia Balsam, Shunori Ramanathan and Laura Benanti
Credits: Directed by Sara Colangelo, scripted by Max Borenstein. A Netflix release.
If you’ve ever switched on a television, you probably figure everything that can be done with the idea of a “New York romance” has already been done. And thanks to “When Harry Met Sally,” Woody Allen, “She’s Gotta Have It,” “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and “Living Single,” you’d be right.
Or maybe the genre hasn’t been beaten to death. It’s just that everybody coming along now has been so exposed to all the earlier rom-coms that finding “fresh” is nigh on impossible.
“Dating & New York” is another variation of the “Friends with Benefits” school. We’re cute together, we get along, why not try “all the benefits of a relationship without the miserable torture of actually being in one.”
Sure, never seen THAT before. But if the script is witty and poignantly romantic and the leads engaging and fun to hang with and enough “new” New York slang, locations and metrosexual practices are thrown in, it can be perfectly watchable, right?
Right. Except “Dating & New York” misses a few items on that checklist. Most of them, in fact, including the most important. The “romance,” which pairs up perky but bland Francesca Reale (“Stranger Things” with comically bloodless JaboukieYoung-White (“Set It Up”), isn’t romantic in the least. Going for a Hallmark PG (How they rated this inoffensive pablum PG-13 is a mystery) just underscores how serious writer-director Jonah Feingold was about making this the least sexy New York romance since we figured out what a creep Woody Allen actually is.
And as insipid and formulaic as it plays, adding cloying, tin-eared voice-over narration by Jerry Ferrara (“Entourage”) is like a pork rind topping for your fat-free yogurt cone.
Wendy and Milo meet via app, hook up and stumble into each other again after an accidental ghosting. Their friends — Catherine Cohen is Jessie, Wendy’s BFF, Brian Muller is Hank, Milo’s wingman — meet each other at the same time.
So we have that “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” set-up, with the secondary couple coupling up and advising the delusional lead couple through their “relationship contract” arrangement.
Wendy offers that she’ll be comfort food companionship, “like that episode of ‘The Office’ you know line by line. You know what to expect.”
So do we.
Wendy and Milo will dine out, hang out and hook up, and occasionally counsel each other through “dates” outside their “arrangement.” No tears, no ghosting, no hard feelings. And they won’t be what every single New York without a dog fears the most — “alone.”
If you’ve ever seen any of the sitcoms listed above, or “How I Met Your Mother” or “Living Single,” you know where this is going and can guess every single step taken in that journey.
Narrator Ferrara plays Cole, a doorman and “voice of reason” who asks the obvious — “What happens when one of you ‘catches feelings?'”
A couple of bit characters come closest to landing a laugh. None of the leads do.
The script is social media savvy, making tepid jokes about the “commitment” difference between a couple selfie “in your story” or on “your grid” on Instagram.
There’s got to be a women are “playing chess, we’re playing Nintendo 64” crack, an “only in New York” observation or three, a “We need to talk” moment.
But as helpful as it is to know that Tompkins Square Park is “New York’s break-up hot spot,” and the difference between a “boug-dega” and a “BO-dega,” that’s not enough to warrant the 90 minute teeth-grind that is the instantly-dated “Dating & New York.”
Rating: PG-13 “for sexual material and brief language,” but really much closer to PG.
Cast: Francesca Reale, Jaboukie Young-White, Brian Muller Catherine Cohen and Jerry Ferrara.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonah Feingold. An IFC release.
Although I liked the sweet, sentimental vibe the weeper “Afterlife of the Party” reaches for, it never comes close to transcending its modest aims and becoming special.
But I’m totally on board the idea of Netflix being the after-teen-stardom home for Victoria Justice, whose taste or offers still put her on the “family friendly” side of the Hollywood equation.
She’s the perky, sometimes manic anchor of this story of a party-girl/party planner who meets an untimely end. Her “Afterlife” sees her forced to spend a short stint in purgatory taking care of “unfinished business” with the BFF (Midori Francis) she had a falling out with just before her accident, with her sad and lonely yoga instructor Dad (Adam Garcia) and the wife and mother (Gloria Garcia) who walked out on them both years before.
Miss “Victorious” plays Cassie, whose insistence on a week of partying — “Cassie-palooza” — to celebrate her 25th birthday is pretty much her undoing.
Paleontologist, childhood friend and roomie Lisa (Francis, of “Good Boys” and TV’s “Dash & Lily”) would rather stay home and do jigsaw puzzles, “like we used to.” Nothing doing! Champagne with my “friends!”
“It’s like you aren’t worth anything if you aren’t seen,” Lisa whines.
Cassie is shallow, sure. Always perfectly turned-out, too. But she doesn’t stay in touch with her father, and is flat-out estranged from her mother.
And since yes, you can die from a hangover (tripping), she’s a goner. This helpful guardian angel (Robyn Scott, kind of funny) is here to “help you with the transition” and lay out the rules — the number of days the unseen/unheard Cassie has to “fix” what she left broken in life.
Hallmark movie veteran Carrie Freedle scripted this, and one sign of a lazy script is when it goes to the trouble of introducing “rules,” and then can’t figure out how to write around them. That “can’t see me/hear me” thing falls by the wayside at the drop of a hat.
The cleverest bits stick to that rule — Cassie hiding all of Lisa’s frumpy clothes so that she wears her cutest outfit to work, and dazzles the Brit composer (Timothy Renouf) neighbor she’s been crushing on, Cassie putting an LP on the Brit’s turntable that puts romantic ideas in his ears and then his head.
Director Stephen Herek, who went from “Critters” and the original “Bill & Ted” to directing Dolly Parton movies, Christmas TV movies, and Dolly Parton Christmas TV movies, doesn’t stand in the way of the schmaltz here. The picture works well enough when we hit the emotional peaks, but the film dawdles along, with only the tiniest of laughs and the limpest of one-liners.
“Somebody call Marie Kondo,” Cassie chirps at seeing her dad’s forlorn beachside house. “‘Joy’ is NOT sparking here!”
The best line spins out of Cassie’s crush for a singer she was just dying to meet before, you know. Val the angel isn’t letting the ghost Cassie score time with him.
“Way to ANGEL block me, Val!”
Justice, running through countless cute and sexy outfits and gobs of glittery makeup, plays a slightly more adult version of her teen TV guise here. Maybe she’s not “growing” as an actress, or broadening her image. No R-rated “Spring Breaks” for her.
But Justice carries off this tear-jerker, mainly because she has to. Francis is the one co-star in her league, charm and charisma-wise. Almost everybody else cast in it is “adequate,” and not much more.
If a lot of people Netflix it, maybe this will be her “afterlife” — light, family-friendly entertainments for the streaming service. Wonder if Dolly needs a Christmas sidekick this year?
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Victoria Justice, Midori Francis, Robyn Scott, Adam Garcia, Gloria Garcia and Timothy Renouf
Credits: Directed by Stephen Herek, scripted by Carrie Freedle. A Netflix release.
“Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is more martial arts than Marvel, and that’s a good thing. Even the in-movie winks at the Marvel “stick the superhero landing” formula have grown stale. “Shang Chi” allows the universe to access all sorts of Chinese folklore, legend, history and myth — as well as martial arts movie tropes.
If only they’d done more of that.
It’s a film of dazzling effects, with the psychotronic bolts and shock-waves emanating from characters’ fingers taking a back seat to some truly Next Gen level water effects, bamboo forest maze scenes, and a pull-out all the stops Spider-Man-styled battle with bad guys in a moving, articulated (two-coach) bus up and down the streets of San Francisco. Stunning, and fun.
But that’s pretty much the high water mark for the Marvel moments in this two-hours-plus saga. The air goes out of the balloon, bit by bit, through a Macau fight club and high rise scaffolding chase, and the long middle acts settle into tedium, exposition and entropy.
“Kim’s Convenience” alumnus Simi Liu was tapped to play the title role, a young guy raised by his supervillain-who-settled-down Dad (Tony Leung of “In the Mood for Love”). His immortal Dad trained him to fight, but Shaun fled China for San Francisco. Now, he happily parks product-placement BMWs at a swank hotel with his joker BFF, Katy (Awkwafina).
But the past — detailed in enchanted opening scenes showing how Xu Wenwu (Leung) met, and fought the woman (Fala Chen) who became his wife and made him give up his never-ending search for power — catches up with Shaun. Hulking minions, including the magic-blade-armed Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu) catch him on that bus.
Sure, his fight is live-streamed by a net-lump (Zach Cherry) helping Shaun go viral as “Bus Boy.” But the bottom line is, they stole his mother’s jade amulet.
He and Katy must dash off to China’s pre-Vegas Vegas — Macau — track down his sister (Meng’er Zhang) at her fight club and, after a throwdown in the ring, warn her that her amulet is on evil Dad’s mind.
“I don’t know what he wants with them, but we both know it can’t be good.”
The jokes, including a light sample of Awkwafina’s wide-eyed, profanity-punctuated gawking, are mostly low-hanging fruit, although the live-streaming bus fight is a hoot.
The dialogue, concocted by a “WW84” scribe, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton and his “Just Mercy” screenwriter, is thin on jokes and weak on The Wisdom of the Far East.
“You are a product of all who came before you…A blood debt must be repaid by blood.”
The inclusion of a cute, headless, winged fantasy dog critter and retrieving Oscar winner Ben Kingsley from an earlier Marvel movie show that Cretton, who also did “Glass Castle” and “Short Term 12,” knew the tone to go for — light — and did his best to find it.
But the sitcom-vet leading man is seriously wooden, never showing us much in the way of range, never finding the character’s heart or funnybone.
Leung is an actor known for understated, sublimated performances. That doesn’t get the job done, playing Dad-the-Heavy here. He’s terrific at the fight choreography, but tentative in delivering his lines in English.
The over-exposed Awkwafina may have burned through any extra wit she could bring to the set to juice her character.
And Munteanu doesn’t have to do much as “Razor Fist,” but he never lets us forget his acting limitations as he does.
Bringing in Kingsley suggests the producers knew this wasn’t quite there in the script stage, and he adds a couple of grins. But nothing more.
Zhang and Chen make their female leads more interesting in performance than any of the menfolk. And that charisma gap is underscored when the effortlessly cool and commanding Michelle Yeoh shows up in the third act. Her presence and gravitas dominates her scenes and delivers a lot of what the leading men do not, even if that third act plays more like “The Chronicles of Narnia” than “House of Flying Daggers” — magical creatures galore.
Cretton wasn’t a natural choice to helm this, but when it works, you’re keenly aware he gets it. When it doesn’t, you wish he’d had the luxury of a script doctor before the cameras rolled.
And let me add that “Shang Chi” ends with not one but two post-credits Marvel “teasers,” and that they are the lamest in Marvel movie history.
All that said, it was smart of Disney/Marvel to try and further diversify/grow-the-brand by digging deep into Marvel’s archives for another culture to represent.
And maybe there’s a Chinese historical/political allegory in the thousand-year story of the immortal, ten-bracelet-empowered Xu Wenwu more aimed at Asian viewers that I only saw faint traces of. Here is a dictatorial villain who scores nationalist points for vanquishing Medieval Islamic and colonial British foes in a montage, a bad guy who softens with the love of a good woman, but who returns to his ruthless, power-mad ways after her death.
A poke at China’s long history and the sort of figures who ruled it, with or without popular support? Maybe.
Sadly, the impressive-looking but unemotional, only-sometimes-fun superhero movie they wrapped any “message” in plays like The Long March, a bit of a slog.
Rating: PG-13, for sequences of violence and action, and language (profanity)
Cast: Simu Liu, Tony Leung, Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Florian Munteanu, Benedict Wong, Ben Kingsley and Michelle Yeoh
Credits: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, script by Dave Callaham, Andrew Lanham and Destin Daniel Cretton, based on the Marvel comics. A Disney/Marvel release.
With the pandemic shutting down live performances for over a year and better-informed/cautious fans still leery of festival seating or moshing their way back into venues, alt rock/arena rock/pop rockers Shinedown decided to remind fans they’re out there — or will be soon — with an old school “video album.”
“Attention Attention,” their most recent studio LP (another is due out this fall, according to what I’ve read), is another chart-challenging smash from the quartet. They hired Marilyn Manson’s favorite video director, Bill Yukich, to turn the 14 tracks into quasi-arty “performance” videos, again pretty old school.
As such things go, it isn’t bad. It isn’t remotely as interesting as a good “in the studio to cut a record and having a hard time of it” documentary, some of which have been known to capture a “Eureka” moment of creation. It’s not a mediocre or epic concert film, not a “get to know the band” doc either.
But for what it is, it’s not awful, kind of MTV @1989 — only post-grunge.
See the band lip-sync and thrash about in matching black ensembles, or matching (nearly) suits, dolled up as their favorite glam or whatever performers (Elvis, Elton, etc). Check out the flames, lots and lots of flames, as songs are rendered into fiery or monstrous nightmares, or semi-sexy dreams (model/actress FrancescaEastwood appears, among many others).
The occasional arresting image aside, the collected videos are seriously run-of-the-mill. They’re symbolic and/or literal, soundstage-bound or out of doors, always with dreadlocked drummer Barry Kerch whaling away, Eric Bass keeping time on the instrument he’s named for, Zach Myers power-chording his guitar and Brent Smith sing-shouting in that heavily-overdubbed and harmonious Offspring, Fuel style some seriously dark, and occasionally upbeat lyrics.
“I was sent to warn you, the Devil’s in the next room.”
“When your Mom is a burnout and you Daddy is a pyro, set fire to the family tree.”
Yes, actors playing a biker and biker moll and a lot of flames figure in that one. Another is set in a plastic surgery clinic. They could be playful in the hands of a director/editor with a lighter touch, but that would be off-brand.
In between the tracks we hear Smith, in voice over, intoning that “Wanting things to change is not the same as making things change.”
“Everything is so important, until it’s not.” “You can’t go back. You can’t rewind. It just is.”
Sometimes quoting Springsteen or Shinedown is the only “pretentious/vapid” comment necessary.
The artier touches include a snippet of the band glimpsed in reflection in (Digitally-created) water, and that vamped up glam sequence.
In “Special,” Smith sings “You’re not special,” which has a whiff of self-mockery about it. I’ve heard these guys on alt-rock radio but never listened enough to be able to separate them from the many sound-alikes in their various formats.
But I can see and hear why they’re chart-toppers. They’re more positive than negative, the tunes are catchy and high energy. And the lyrics, while nobody’s idea of serious profundity, aren’t bad either.
“Keep your eye on the prize and your feet on the ground…This human radio is playing your anthem.”
The “movie?” Probably for fans only.
Rating: unrated, some profanity, disturbing images, nudity
Cast: Brent Smith, Barry Kerch, Eric Bass, Zach Myers, Francesca Eastwood, Melora Walters and Raelynn Harper.
Credits: Directed by Bill Yukich. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Spare, intense and deeply unnerving, “Anne at 13,000 ft” an indie drama that manages to keep the viewer on tenterhooks by concentrating on the bare essentials — an unbalanced young woman who is never more than one bad day from having a complete breakdown.
Toronto filmmaker Kazik Radwanski (“Tower”) keeps his camera hand-held and tight on his leading lady. And Deragh Campbell, in that title role, is relentlessly unsettling, an actress who lets us see a disconnection that borders on madness behind Anne’s eyes.
Twentysomething Anne works in a Toronto day care, and picks up a little extra cash on the side babysitting for the parents of some of the kids there. She’s popular with the children, probably because she’s childlike herself.
She laughs, self-consciously, is unfiltered and inappropriate at times. She’s prone to being inconsiderate or downright rude, only to brush it off as her own personal “joke.”
She has a hard time following instructions and taking orders. And in a licensed Canadian day care, that can be a problem.
We meet her as she skydives, in tandem with an experienced professional. Yes, she Tom Cruises it — doing the stunt herself. She seems to black out in ecstasy, losing herself in the moment
Because that’s where Anne lives. But could anyone live with her, deal with her manic mood swings, her refusal to stop doing something when someone else corrects her, her constant laughter, even when she’s letting us see a flash of temper?
Anne is a truly cringe-worthy heroine, and not the fun “Office” type. Radwanski has made such folks something of a specialty.
We fear Anne, and we fear for her as she meets a possibly-nice/possibly predatory guy (Matt Johnson) at a wedding and cannot stop drinking any more than she can stop with her borderline-upsetting bridesmaid’s toast. She reminds us, at every turn, that she’s being left in charge of people’s children, and that’s just plain alarming.
Campbell (“Project Ithaca,” “Possessor”) effortlessly holds down the film’s endless succession of close-ups. She is never over-the-top, even as Anne flirts with outright mania, melting down with her mother (Lawrene Denkers), snapping at sales clerks (“Can you stop following me?”), forever wrong-footing poor Matt.
“You’re a weird little girl, you know that?”
It’s a compact, nearly perfect performance of a character who leaves you exhausted even though we only spend 75 minutes with her.
You bail out of “Anne at 13,000 ft” fretting for her future and wondering if there’s a med she’s off or a treatment she’s refused to undertake. Because eventually, the wincing, worrying and the cringing would wear down anybody stuck in her company.
Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson, Lawrene Denkers
Credits: Written and directed by Kazik Radwanski. A Cinema Guild release.
