Pretty fair likeness, I’d say.
The star of “The Bear” channels 30something Springsteen as he takes on the existential and creative crisis that turned into “Nebraska.”
Scott Cooper of “Crazy Heart” and “Hostiles” directs. Decent buzz for this Oct. 24 release. I get a reverential vibe from this second trailer.
“Grassland” is an intimate social justice drama about the bottom level of the marijuana business, a tale told in the last of its years as a banned and not merely “controlled substance.”
A single mom struggles to make ends meet by growing, prepping and selling weed out of her rental duplex’s basement in New Jersey. An aged cop moves into the other half of the duplex. You can guess the rest.
Mia Maestro (“The Motorcycle Diaries,” TV’s “Nashville,” “The Strain”) is Sofia, an Argentine immigrant estranged from her mother (Rachel Ticotin) and on her own with young son Leo (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). She dotes on him and reads to “Prince Leonardo” from Homer’s “Odyssey.”
But even at this age, Leo is pretty much a co-conspirator. He knows what mom does and is just now awakening to the problems it could lead to for her, him and her young deliveryman and sometimes baby sitter Brandon (Quincy Isaiah, Magic Johnson on TV’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”).
Virtually “nobody’s buying,” in this economy. She’s had problems with mites in her plants, is behind on her rent and now the duplex owner has rented the other half of it to a grandpa (Jeff Kober of TV’s “China Beach”) and his grandson Tom (Sean Convery).
Great. Leo has a playmate.
But grandad John rolls up to the place in a police cruiser, putting Sofia in a panic. Sofia’s got to hide what she does, from the actual plants to the scent, pretend she doesn’t know Brandon and keep Leo from giving away the game to Tom. She may minimize the new risks to Brandon, who has a record and isn’t stupid, and she might think she’s allaying her little boy’s fears.
“Are we criminals? Are we getting arrested?”
It doesn’t help that John’s bitter, a cop being shown the door and a caregiver thanks to what we figure out must have happened to his daughter, Tom’s mother.
Co-writers/directors William Bermudez and Sam Friedman focus not on the nature of the crime, as it then was, but on the circumstances of those wrapped up in it. It’s 2008 and the country’s in the throes of the Bush II recession.
Montclair, New Jersey isn’t Newark. This is the lowest stakes battleground in the failed, more-cultural-than-criminal “War on Drugs.”
And this isn’t TV’s “Weeds,” a sometimes jolly, sometimes dangerous lark for a housewife to find a “career” setting up and running a big growhouse-to-street distribution system. The problems, to a one, are the The System itself — racial profiling, over-empowered police, punishments absurdly out of proportion to the crime.
The risks aren’t worth the rewards, and only the most desperate would take those odds. Brandon is smart enough to know that getting out is Job One. But few will hire someone with a criminal record. Sofia thinks she knows the risks and “can hande” this. But smart people don’t get into this “business.”
“Grasslands” maybe be pretty much wholly predictable. But the performances have heart, compassion and a testy edge when that’s called for.
And this simplest of period piece parables lays bare the inequity of “justice” as pot legalization was just beginning and the “gateway drug” theory was fading into the mists of myth.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, drug content
Cast: Mia Maestro, Jeff Kober, Quincy Isaiah, Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Sean Convery and Rachel Ticotin
Credits: Scripted and directed by William Bermudez and Sam Friedman. A Gravitas Ventures release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:29
Has a “Delicatessen” vibe, does it not?
And Glover has completed the transition to dead ringer for his Bond villain/”Barney Miller” recurring dad.
This makes a North American release appearance Oct. 8.
Film fan lore has long implied that Steven Spielberg, the producer of the horror blockbuster “Poltergeist,” was really its director or at least co-director.
The 1982 film has Spielbergian touches — compositions, classical editing, the striking lighting and the inclusion of and affecting performances by children. He was on a roll at the time and could seemingly do no wrong and was given much of the credit for the film’s success.
But all of that had the effect of diminishing the artist actually behind the camera, the long underrated horror icon Tobe Hooper. He made many more movies, but his reputation suffered and his career never had the kind of trajectory a smash hit/cultural touchstone thriller should have served up.
The college professor, whose worldview and art were informed by witnessing the infamous mass shooting by sniper Charles Whitman at the University of Texas in 1966, widely regarded as one of the most influential horror filmmakers ever, more than gets his due in the new documentary “Chain Reactions.”
The title may be a glib pun on the movie Hooper made infamous, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” And its first interview is with a standup comic, Patton Oswalt, who long did a bit arguing that “A movie title should let you see a mini movie in your head,” tell you everything you need to know in four or five words.
“Best. Title. EVER? ‘Texas CHAIN SAW Massacre!”
But this film, from the director of “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist,'” is a deep, incisive, celebratory and cerebral dive into the “art” of Hooper’s most imitated work.
Stephen King, who worked with Hooper on a couple of projects, practically sings his praise about the movie’s notorious cheapness, its “washed-out ’70s” visuals, with even the grainier and grainier prints (it was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm initially) and worn VHS tape viewings patina adding to its impact.
“It looks f—–g REAL!”
Karyn Kusama, director of “Girlfight,” “The Invitation” and episodes of “Halt and Catch Fire” and “Yellowjackets,” unwinds the politics, cultural warnings and “the saddest, scariest depiction of (broken) masculinity ever seen on film.”
With his film of dim-witted, violent and obsolete blue collar (and rural) Americans preying and eating young people (“hippies”) who fall into their clutches, “the young artist (Hooper) was looking into the future of America.”
Japanese horror icon Takashi Miike (“Ichi the Killer,” “One Missed Call”) marvels at how his fate was sealed the day he missed a showing of Chaplin’s classic “City Lights” and dropped in on a cinema showing “Chain Saw Massacre” instead, a movie that caused a revolution in Japanese horror cinema, setting the table for “J-horror.”
Miike and King embrace the “lack of morality” of Hooper’s creation, the extremes it goes to. Kusama talks about how unpleasant it is to sit through and how much more unpleasant it can be to watch again.
All mention how “the story makes no sense,” the “acting” is so “amateur” as to make the viewer believe serial killers “have gotten their hands on a film camera” and are documenting their work.
And Australian critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes “Chain Saw Massacre’s” influence on generations of Australian cinema, largely thanks to the fact that it was banned for years. Handing down VHS copies of a movie with “beautiful” flashes of nature and vivid colors in aging, yellowing hues made Australian movies imitating its “Outback yellow” look.
Scores of movies (“Nosferatu,” etc.) that predated “Chain Saw” or were influenced by it (“The Evil Dead,” “Midsommar,” “The Blair Witch Project,” of course) and are name-dropped and sampled. Great art works by Bacon and Bosch that Hooper either mimicked or “accidentally” paid visual homage to are compared to scenes and shots and sequences.
But Patton Oswalt is here to balance the critical parsing as the ultimate fanboy, geeking out over sequences, characters, messages and obscure other titles that connect to this brutal, unblinking and so-ugly-it’s-a-thing-of-beauty classic.
It’s not enough to make one want to go back to “Chain Saw.” Kusama got that right. But if you want an Ur Text for modern movie horror, from “Tales from the Crypt” to “torture porn,” there it is. And if you want to understand the genre, it remains the most essential viewing of any modern horror tale.
Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence and nudity
Cast: Stephen King, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, Patton Oswalt and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. A Dark Sky release.
Running time: 1:44
The Immortal Bard’s son Hamnet died at 11. His twin, Judith, lived to the ripe old age of 77.
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the bereaved parents has been adapted by Oscar winner Chloe Zao (“Nomadland”) with Buckley and Mescal as Agnes and William Shakespeare, and Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn as William’s parents.
This comes out Thanksgiving.
Here’s a thought.
Of the legions of Hollywood offspring who became “nepo baby” movie stars, Charlie Sheen may be the only one to question his status and how he got it, who developed guilt over his fame and even his gifts and feels he doesn’t “deserve it.”
That insight is from Sheen’s longest-serving co-star, Jon Cryer (“Two and a Half Men”), a smart cookie who has observed the wonder and the terror of Charlie Sheen — son of Martin, brother of Emilio — up close. He’s experienced the “regular guy” charm. He’s seen his own livelihood battered by Sheen’s addictions.
And, as he says in the new two-part documentarty “aka Charlie Sheen,” he’s noticed that “consequences” never keep cuddly, charming Charlie from making another comeback, which is why Cryer was a reluctant participant in this ups-and-downs/Charlie-in-his-Own-Words documentary.
He’s not sure the world, or Charlie, needs a “comeback” to happen.
Cryer, Sheen’s old pal and childhood neighbor Sean Penn, Sheen’s ex-wife Denise Richards and his former “boss,” “Two and a Half Men” creator Chuck Lorre are among the canniest observers and analyzers of this “icon of decadence,” as Cryer describes Sheen.
But Sheen himself, interviewed in a marathon session or two by filmmaker Andrew Renzi (“Ready for War,” Netflix’s “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?”) in a booth in closed-after-hours Chips Diner, is the star attraction, the spinner, rationalizer, deflecter and teller of hard unpleasant truths in the story of his star-studded, sexually adventurous, cocaine-and-everything-else addicted life.
“If you ask Charlie did he do this,” Penn avers, “he’s gonna tell you the truth.”
Penn’s the expert on fame and addiction and “public life” in this dirty laundry doc. Richards, the second of Sheen’s ex-wives — famous since “Wild Things,” his wife and sometime co-star during the “Two and a Half Men” meltdown — brings the pathos, all that the man kept throwing away. “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss is here to bring judgement, the woman he threw under the bus after getting caught hiring her prostitutes.
And Marco is here to talk about the drugs, drugs which Marco supplied Charlie with for years. “My pal” Charlie calls him. Marco’s got home videos and selfies to give him street cred and Charlie cred.
Who takes SELFIES with their drug dealer? Charlie effing Sheen, that’s who.
No, he’s not like us, and it’s not just him who says so. His Keith Richards tolerance for controlled or banned substances leaves people like third ex wife Brooke Mueller in awe and even gives Penn pause.
Sheen is here to speak his “truth,” own to a lot of it and blame some of it one this or that drug and his struggle with it at the time as he answers Renzi’s off-camera questions, queries that probe more than challenge, but that take him and us into the worst of the worst of Charlie Sheen.
Sheen also provides “structure” to his rise and fall, “comeback” and “come back again” story.
With fame, there was “Partying.” Then “Partying with Problems.” And finally that devolved into “Just Problems.” The fact that Shee’s still here tells us there might be a more upbeat ending after those three “chapters” than you’d expect.
Home movies with brothers Emilio Estevez (who declined to participate) and Ramon Estevez (interviewed) sister Renée Estevez (not interviewed) show a Super 8 movie-making obsessed childhood in pre-super wealth Malibu and parenting that had the family traipsing off to movie star dad Martin Sheen’s (not interviewed) film locations (the Philippines for “Apocalypse Now”).
The love and support of Dad (Mom is almost never mentioned) is a constant, from Martin giving Charlie the one bit of coaching he needed to launch his career with a one-scene turn in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to Martin urging the public to “pray for Charlie” after one near-fatal drug-induced collapse, prayers the elder Sheen had been asking journalists to provide for years any time he met the press.
But we get a hint that maybe distracted ’70s parenting was a part of this mix, too. Charlie, his siblings and neighbor kids, were into “weed” in their tweens. That came after his parents’ “naked” around the house years.
Sheen’s a fun storyteller, and he relates how fellow nepo-baby and childhood friend Jennifer Gray got him that one scene role in “Ferris,” and how he borrowed older brother Ramon’s leather jacket and stayed up all night to create the “look” of his police station delinquent in the film.
He loved sports, and revels in his basketball encounter with Michael Jordan and a close friend verifies his baseball skills, even “just after he got outta rehab.”
Sheen laments having to give up “The Karate Kid” big break for a C-movie he agreed to make in Eastern Europe. So he made his screen debut with George Clooney and Laura Dern and Louise Fletcher in “Grizzly II,” a bomb nobody saw.
“Platoon” came calling, then “Wall Street.” Penn astutely notes how Charlie’s screen career mirrored his dad’s — a punk in “Badlands,” a Vietnam soldier in Apocalpyse” and so on.
Sheen regales us with the heady fame that came, with little effort, in his peak years and his shift to comedy — “Hot Shots,” “Major League.” The world was his oyster. But competing with pal and running mate Nic Cage on partying binges sealed his fate. He’d get out of control. And time and again there’d be “no consequences” for it.
The entire part two of “aka Charlie Sheen” is about the reckoning that came and the public’s disturbing reaction to it when the wheels finally came off.
Continue readingColman plays an Aussie filmmaker in Sophie Hyde’s (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”) drama, drawn from Hyde’s own life.
It’s about reconnecting with an estranged parent living his best (gay) life in Amsterdam, and how that may impact her own nin-binary kid.
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My kinda Florida cop tale — drug money is too tempting for fellows who always have to ask themselves, “Are we the good guys?”
True story.
Jan. 16.
Lady Mary makes one more most-unladylike sexual mistake, “Mum-MAH” dishes up one more serving of proto-feminist American common sense and one last “season” in London town is experienced for “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” of the highbrow British/PBS soap opera that has also produced three movies.
It’s a starchy send-off filled with stiff dialogue and so much fan service that it fairly drowns in characters and new versions of events and scenes that we’ve watched played-out in other forms over the long history of this period piece franchise. All those episodes and movies, it can’t help but play as repetitive and recycled.
How many more affairs, dressing room confidences exchanged with the maids and strolls around the grounds can one endure?
But then a pretty fair proximation of the “Downton” era’s greatest wit — the playwright, actor and gay bon vivant Noël Coward –– shows up. And damned if Downton and those who made it don’t make a graceful, warm bon voyage into the cinematic sunset.
I’d always suspected that perfect bookend to this saga would be to end it as the house is taken over for the all-consuming struggle that was Britain facing Nazi Germany in World War II. The series began on the eve of WWI after all, and the estate and the poshes who live there and the plebes who served them did their bit as The Great War errupted around them. The fact that many “Great Houses” did not come out of the Second World War in the same shape or the same hands, something “Brideshead Revisited” touched on, seemed to suggest the perfect coda.
But creator Julian Fellowes, who used his script for Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” as a dry run for “Downton” — knows best. And he begins this outing in style, with a “season” at Grantham House, the family’s townhome in London, where the East End features a play by Coward (Arty Froushan, terrific) starring dashing old actor friend of the family Guy Dexter (Dominic West), whose backstage dresser and “pal” is Mr. Barrow (Robert James-Collier), once a closeted valet at Downton.
Lord Grantham’s beloved mother (Maggie Smith) died in the last film. And now American-born Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) has lost her mother (played by Shirley MacLaine, remember) and her affairs are in a mess.
Because Lady Grantham left her businessman/brother (Paul Giamatti) in charge. The Wall Street crash almost wiped them out, and he took on an advisor, Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola), who is tall, dark and sketchy.
The Lord may be putting the Abbey in the hands of their daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). But she’s not above being plied with the latest cocktails from America by the wily and beguiling Gus.
Yes, she winds up in bed with him, which considering word of her divorce has just scandalized her and put her on the “shunning” list of London and Yorkshire society, isn’t a smart move. And yes, that’s exactly how this saga began, 16 years ago, with Lady Mary bedding a houseguest and trying to keep that a secret when he winds up dead the morning after.
Gus, being American, doesn’t have the good manners to die and be less of a problem.
The Lord may or may not relinquish control of the Abbey and its now-turning-over staff. Mr. Carson (the regal Jim Carter) is retiring, as is the earthy, old school cook, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol). The increasingly confident and self-assured Daisy (Sophie McShera) is taking over for her, and her refusal to be overly impressed by her “betters” makes egalitarian in-law Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton) appoint her and the retiring Carson to the committee that runs the local fair.
They’ll do battle with the formidably snobby, Lady Mary-shunning Sir Hector (Simon Russell Beale).
With dicey finances, “improvements” needed for the cottages on the property and more “changes” than one old Lord and Lady can handle on their own, it’s nice that help is never more than one kindhearted relative away.
The widowed Tom (Allen Leech), once a servant, now a socialist rolling in just-sold-my-business cash, will pitch in. The staff will spread the right rumors and “scandal,” “cash poor” or not, all will be made right by this nice world of nice people, not all of whom were “nice” on the series.
Continue reading
“Getting the band back together” nostalgia is fine. Realizing that they can still play well into their ’70s is something of a “good for them” triumph.
And maybe coming to the conclusion that for a parody of a bombastic, pretentious British heavy metal band of the ’60s through the ’80s, tunes like “Big Bottom,” “Hell Hole,” “Flower People” and “Stonehenge” pretty much hold up.
But as amusing as it’s been over the years for “the lads” of Spinal Tap to turn up on late night chat-variety shows to prove they’re as musical and as clueless as ever, a sequel to “This is Spinal Tap,” the mockumentary that really invented that label, can’t help but play as winded, gassed, joked-out and pointless.
“Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” comes off like what used to be called “a contractual obligation album,” or a chance to re-record and grab the rights back to their music and the movie that made them. They might finally profit from a fake band, their fake band back catalog of tunes and that fake documentary that Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls, David St. Hubbins and director Marty DiBergi barely made a dime from.
That goes for their creators, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Rob Reiner as well. It’s ironically hilarious that the guys who made the movie about the clueless fake band were clueless enough to sign the worst deal possible with distributors, just to get the original film made.
But the bottom line is, that’s why “Spinal Tap II: Finally Cashing In” exists.
Guest’s mockumentary career went its course, and he tried a filmmaking comeback with Netflix (“Mascots”) that didn’t work out a few years back. McKean has worked steadily in supporting roles (“Better Call Saul,” “The Diplomat”) and voice-over work in the intervening years — nothing to make one rich. And Reiner’s acted a bit, even as his directing career fell off dramatically after the charming “Flipped” flopped fifteen years ago.
Shearer? He’s had his lucrative “Simpsons” gig since the ’80s. He’s fine. Which is perhaps the reason he’s not credited as a writer here, and that he has little to say or contribute that’s funny. He’s just the bass player, man. He just has to show up.
Derek’s running The New Museum of Glue these days. Nigel runs a Cheese & Guitars Shop. St. Hubbins is making music for podcasts.
Reasons more contrived than logical broke them up, and now they’re reuniting for a big New Orleans comeback/farewell concert. They audition or approach famous drummers (Lars Uhlrich, Questlove, Chad Smith) and little knowns (including a Blue Man Group alumnus) to replace the “eleven” they’ve killed off.
Riot Grrrrl Didi (Valerie Franco) gets the gig. They add Caucasian Jeff (CJ Vanston) on keyboards, cope with a new manager, Simon (Chris Addison) and the fangirlish daughter (Kerry Goldiman) of their original manager and settle into the rehearsal studio where the parade of famous cameos continue, none of them to hilarious effect.
Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks to Paul McCartney and Elton John join the deadpan parade, and some manage to drag out a smile or two as they’re insulted, or turn insulting.
But in the 41 years since Spinal Tap sent-up the supposedly then-just-passed “classic rock” era, communities from coast to coast have opened outdoor concert venues that only yacht rock and classic rock and other nostalgia acts can fill. Promoters call these ampitheatres “Jurassic Parks.”
“Classic rock” hung around. Bad Company just got into the Rock Hall of Fame.
Comical documentaries about real bands of the genre that never quite made it (“Anvil!”) have come out. And Guest made a whole career out of mockumentaries, even tapping into old folk musician nostalgia (“A Mighty Wind”) for one film.
Clips and outtakes from the original film take us back. But the music they sent up never went away, even if they did. For a while.
The joke is played, the conceit is worn out and seeing granddad-bod Guest in a kilt isn’t nearly the hoot one might have hoped.
So if you want to support this crew getting control of their amusing and enduring intellectual property, I’d suggest you give the documentary a pass and just buy the concert LP. “Hell Hole” still rocks, “Big Bottom” still rolls, and you know “Stonehenge” will finish with a crash, with or without dwarf druids dancing in the ruins.
Rating: R, profanity
Cast: Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner, Valerie Franco, CJ Vantston, Kerry Godliman, Chris Addison, with Trisha Yearwood, Lars Ulhrich, Garth Brooks, Paul McCartney and Elton John.
Credits: Directed by Rob Reiner, scripted by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Rob Reiner. A Bleecker Street release.
Running time: 1:23
Movie Nation 