Movie Review: The Demure Charms of Aisling Bea and Billie Lourd unleashed — “And Mrs”

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Roger Moore

“And Mrs” is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Bea, one of the English speaking world’s greatest talk show guests, stars as a woman whose fiancé dies just before their wedding. Lost and bereft, she decides to follow through on “what Nathan wanted” more than anything else, to be married to her.

Gemma will battle friends, family, customs and her own guilty conscience to make this happen. And as she’s living in London, naturally there’s a loophole in arcane British law that allows such “necrogamy” nuptials.

Gemma, a London-Irish graphic designer, was never the “big gesture” and big emotions one in her relationship to Nathan, played by Colin Hanks. He botches his first “I Love You” by prematurely playing The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” on his phone. He can’t get her to commit to an early “I love you,” just “I’m very, very fond of you.”

And he later made his very public proposal awkward enough for the record books.

But when she comes back from a morning run with her mates Ruth and Mo (Susan Wokoma and Omari Douglas) and Nathan doesn’t wake up, her shock is such than when the paramedics start zipping up the body bag, all she can think to say is “D’ye think he’ll be alright?”

Her parents (Sinéad Cusack and Peter Egan) are little comfort. Talking to Nathan, whom she still “sees” now and again, helps only so much. But when Nathan’s dizzy and somewhat less than considerate (never answers her phone or texts) sister Audrey shows up at the airport for the wedding, pink haired, gay and very pregnant from the surrogacy she took on to pay the bills, Gemma has an ally, someone “who gets me.”

Let friends and family tell her this idea of “doing what Nathan wanted” is “tasteless” and absurd, just a way of not coming to grips with grief. Short-skirted, impulsive and foul-mouthed mom-to-be Audrey is down for the dare.

“Grab hold of your labia! Let’s DO this!”

Melissa Bubnic’s script leans on the tropes of romantic comedies from “P.S. I Love You” to “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with a particular focus on “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

A clumsy hired officiant (Paul Kaye) begins the funeral with “It doesn’t matter if we’re one or 101, we’re never ready to say goodbye,” and then goes completely off the rails with tactless jokes and self-absorbed confessions that wholly misread the room.

Gemma’s mum and her bestie Ruth are dismayed at her fool’s errand of going through the motions — catering, bookings, fitting her dress and the like.

But brassy Audrey, given a kind of dazed disconnection in between outbursts of American self-righteousness by Lourd, becomes Gemma’s wounded ride-or-die, ginning up public outrage over a judge (Harriet Walter, droll) determined not to allow a loophole to puncture 200 years of precedent and tradition.

Yes, Gemma’s online and media nickname becomes “Corpse Bride.”

Director Daniel Reisinger has a lot of story, flashbacks and “explanations” to get through, so the film is longer than it feels. Nathan and Aubrey’s childhood must be contended with (Elizabeth McGovern is the estranged mom) and Gemma’s flashbacks underscore her own “issues.”

Lourd is game, if a tad underwhelming as the “nut” who gives the picture life, but better at hinting at the heart hurt Audrey is dealing with. Bea’s grim sarcasm nicely serves the character and the picture as she gets over her fury of having to break the news to Nathan’s “only family” that he’s died in the arrivals gate at Heathrow.

Of COURSE she’ll take Audrey in.

“Hardly going to throw a pregnant woman out in the streets. It’s not BETHELEHEM, after all.”

And Reisinger and Bubnic follow nuptial-comedy specialist P.J. Harvey’s (“Muriel’s Wedding,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding”) edict that when family and friends gather for weddings, they can’t resist a sing-along, the “comfort food” of any wedding comedy ever since Shakespeare’s “Hey nonny nonnies.”

The narrative has heart and hurt and laughs and a big finish. Sure, it’s formulaic and not every scene has a proper pay off.

But in a cinelandscape where rom-coms that work are as rare as hope for a better tomorrow, “And Mrs” plays, and gives Bea another year or two’s supply of chat show anecdotes and jokes. Not that she’s needed them.

Rating: unrated, with lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Aisling Bea, Billie Lourd, Colin Hanks, Susan Wokoma, Harriet Walter, Omari Douglas, Peter Egan and Sinéad Cusack.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Reisinger, scripted by
Melissa Bubnic A Vertical release on Amazon Prime, other streamers.

Running time: 1:51

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Movie Review: Ancient China sees a Bloody Martial Arts Brawl over the “Nine Ring Golden Dagger”

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Roger Moore

The first laugh in the martial arts quest thriller “Nine Ring Golden Dagger” might be its title. It was called “Blocking the Horse” in China. And the “dagger” that was mistranslated here is a sword attached to a seven or eight foot pike.

And the second laugh is in first title to appear on the screen in it. This movie is “purely fictional,” we’re reaassured.

Those two sword-fighting sisters who struggle with a brawny sea of sworn enemies over a “Nine Ring Nation Stabilizing Golden Sword,” warriors flying with the aid of springboards and wires and shooting hailstorms of arrows and crossbow bolts and swinging clashing, clanging and cutting blades that mainly deliver survivable wounds are all just made up.

Good to know.

The Song and Liao factions are fighting over the lands of the Han Dynasty, either before or after its breakup (that’s unclear). The Song General Yang (Wue Yue) lost the titular golden dagger/sword/pike and his life in battle.

Weeping sisters Baba and Jiumei (Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang) resolve to retrieve it from a Liao stronghold. They dress up as soldiers and have no trouble at all passing for cute, thin fighting men or infiltrating this fortress capital and the Indiana Jones-booby-trapped room where the sword is kept.

They survive wounds and a chase by assorted minions of a security chief (Yu Kang, et al) and take shelter in a roadhouse run by a Song expat (Kai Zhang) ready to return to their homeland. A mistaken identity brawl is how they get acquainted.

“How do you know the Yang family sword-fighting technique (In Mandarin with English subtitles)?”

“Find out in HELL!”

After they figure out they’re on the same side, they’re all basically trapped there for much of the movie as waves of bad guys overtake them, and partake in the house wine before figuring out these are the droids sisters they’re looking for.

The bar brawls are impressive and alternately bloody and low comedy amusing. There’s a towering waiter and diminutive cook sight gag, a foppish foe related to the Liao dowager empress and a lot of strangely survivable slices and impalings as every time you figure that’s it, it’s CURTAINS for this or that protagonist, they somehow rally with a balm or wave of the (three) screenwriters’ hands.

There’s so much exposition and so many characters that the picture is awfully cluttered and even hard to follow before the narrative settles down in that one important location.

Choreographer Gao Meng’s fights are less impressive than the state-of-the-wirework art films in this genre, but pass muster in what amounts to an overpopulated but handsomely mounted martial arts B-picture.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Tianshuo Song, Xintong Zhang, Kai Zhang, Yu Kang, Liu Xinlei, You Xianchao and Wue Yue,

Credits: Directed by Feng Xiaojun, scripted by Gen Zi Qi, Xu Wen-Zheng and Chen Peng. A Well Go USA/Hi-YAH! release.

Running time: 1:34

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Classic Film Review: Streisand, O’Neal and Bogdanovich go Looney Tunes Madcap — “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972)

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Roger Moore

A handful of great filmmakers came to the movies as genuine cinema buffs. Truffaut to Tarantino, Godard and Schrader, Peter Bogdanovich to Park Chan Wook all were film fanatics, some even critics who found a path from taking notes and passing judgment in the dark to sitting behind the camera, waiting to be criticized.

Bogdanovich, who died in 2022, was the quintessential film nerd turned filmmaker. Like Tarantino, he tried to make movies that were an homage to the films and filmgoing of his youth. Unlike Tarantino, who famously cut his teeth on movies working in a porn theater and later in a down market video store, Bogdanovich embraced acknowledged cinema classics — genre works from the Great Masters.

He got his start, like many, working for Roger Corman. And “Targets” became an homage to Corman’s style and make-thrillers-on-the-cheap ethos. His big break was a fin de siecle Western about growing up watching Westerns, a mournful black and white adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show.”

And what did Bogdanovich do with the Oscar-winning Hollywood capital that film gave him? He took a shot at making a modern (1972) “screwball” comedy, full of slapstick, sight gags and manic comic patter. “What’s Up, Doc?” would go full “Bringing Up Baby,” with Barbra Streisand as the chatterbox who keeps running into and bowling over nerdy musicologist Ryan O’Neal, an Iowa academic hoping to prove Neanderthals made music with “igneous rocks.”

The movie archetype “manic pixie dream girl” was born with Hepburn’s turn opposite Cary Grant in that Howard Hawks farce way back in 1938. Streisand, at her peak, would play a hipper, sassier ’70s updating of the type — sexy, flirty and funny, just as aggressive but less needy and overtly sexual than the hooker she played in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” her previous film and a fairly funny comedy in its own right.

Buck Henry would rejoin her to work on the script. Bogdanovich would bring along Randy Quaid from “The Last Picture Show” for good luck, and his then-wife, producer and on this film production and costume designer and the sounding board his career lost when they divorced, Polly Platt.

O’Neal was famously handsome and famously stiff on screen. But paired with Streisand, he was never funnier as an overwhelmed comic foil who’d look despairingly through his glasses at the camera and declare “I’m having a NIGHTmare!” Or look again and plead with the viewer.

“Help!”

And Streisand? She’s a rat-a-tat patter riot. Don’t think you’re insulting her Judy by asking if she “knows the meaning of PROPRIETY?”

“Propriety; noun: conformity to established standards of behavior or manner, suitability, rightness, or justice. See “etiquette.”

“Get Smart” veteran Henry and “Bonnie and Clyde” writers David Newman and Robert Benton packed the script with zingers and silly situations. San Francisco and Bogdanovich, his stunt team, leads and colorful supporting cast which included zany Kenneth Mars, screwy Austin Pendleton, madcap Madeline Kahn, John Hillerman, M. Emmet Walsh and even an uncredited comic (John Byner), did the rest.

There’s these four suitcases, see? Tartan red plaid suitcases (Ah, the ’70s.). One’s got “Top Secret” documents that some sketchy refugee from Woody Allen’s universe (Michael Murphy) stole. One’s full of a rich lady’s (Mabel Anderson) Jewels. One has the Iowa academic’s “igneous rocks.” And one belongs to the not-quite-Frisco-flower-child/hustler (Streisand).

Those cases will be swiped, stashed, switched and tracked and don’t bother trying to keep up with that, because it’s not at all logical and that’s kind of the fun. They’re MacGuffins, gimmicks for driving the action, but not really.

Howard (O’Neal) and his fiancee Eunice (Kahn) travel to San Fran to see if he’s won a grant from a rich philanthropist (Pendleton). But hapless, forgetful, igneous-rocks-obsessed Howard is waylaid by big-eyed Judy (Streisand), who is something of a polymath.

“I guess you’re not really interested in igneous rock formations.”

“Not as much as I am in the sedimentary or metamorphic rock categories. I mean, I can take your igneous rocks or leave ’em. I relate primarily to micas, quartz, feldspar. You can keep your pyroxenes, magnetites and coarse grained plutonics as far as I’m concerned.”

All she needs to do is entice Howard away from the supportive but shrill and bossy Eunice, charm rich Mr. Larrabee (Pendleton) and insult the hell out of the insufferable Eastern European rival for that grant (Mars, as campy as he ever was) so that love can bloom, right?

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

Yup, we’re going to mock O’Neal’s biggest blockbuster (“Love Story”) because as they say in classic madcap comedies, “Nothing’s Sacred.”

Judy will disrupt the big musicologist dinner and cross swords with the insufferable Hugh (Mars).

“I find that as difficult to swallow as this potage au gelee.“

“How would you like to swallow one sandwich d’knuckles?”

Suitcases will be mixed up, and cops and robbers and others will get tangled up in a merry chase through The City by the Bay on foot, via street cart, Chinese parade dragon and a Volkswagen Beetle.

I mean, thank God Beetles float, right?

The patter and the stars’ chemistry leap back to mind, watching this film anew. Future character actor extraordinaire M. Emmet’s bit part in the third act now pops, and I spied Byner in this viewing because both of those guys made movies in cities where I worked and I got to interview them.

But as the mind remembers images more clearly, what sticks, and rather surprisingly so, is the stuntwork.

Yes, “Bullitt” was the ultimate San Francisco chase picture. But stunt coordinator and second unit director Paul Baxley’s team deliver motorized sprints, hilltop leaps, handbrake drifts, crashes and bottoming-outs (cars coming back to Earth after going airborne) that rival anything ever filmed there.

The chases here are funnier, more organic and set in the real world, with ’70s cars lacking the suspension to do most of what we see them do here, and survive. So they don’t survive. Some even wind up in the Bay.

But older viewers will recall which one was advertised as “It also floats.”

Antic high speed banter ages almost as well as slapstick and physical comedy. Those are two big reasons this picture still plays. But casting Streisand and O’Neal as foils seems as inspired as it ever did. And “discovering” Kahn and Sorrel Booke (future Boss Hogg), casting the screwball Mars and the droll baritone John Hillerman (“Magnum P.I.”) and EveryEuropean Stefan Gierasch (“Jeremiah Johnson”) to do what they were known for doing pays dividends that lend “What’s Up, Doc?” a timeless quality.

Bogdanovich would reach his peak with his next film, reuniting with O’Neal and Kahn and putting O’Neal’s daughter Tatum to work in a masterpiece, “Paper Moon.” He’d run out of luck with period piece homages with his attempted musical, “At Long Last Love,” and his career never wholly recovered from that or his split with Platt.

Her professional/personal relationship with “Last Picture Show” author Larry McMurtry would bear further fruit with “Terms of Endearment,” which she production designed, and its sequel, “The Evening Star,” which she produced.

Bogdanovich evolved into the sort of grand old man of the cinema he made documentaries about. No, he wasn’t John Ford, Howard Hawks or Buster Keaton. But he was a living link to their traditions and a great talker and interview subject.

All three screenwriters would go on to further and greater glory, with Benton becoming an Oscar winning writer-director (“Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Places in the Heart”) and Henry scripting “Heaven Can Wait” and Newman and Benton writing “Bad Company” and “Superman.”

And Streisand and O’Neal would re-team a few years later as his career was winding down and she was about to eschew comedies and reach for “serious filmmaker” status with “Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror has Two Faces.” “The Main Event” (1979) had no prayer of living up to its title.

But “What’s Up, Doc?” lives on, a classic that harks back to earlier classics, a screwball comedy that still plays and definitive proof that filmmakers well-versed in the landmark movies of the past can make great films just by copying what worked, way back when.

Rating: G

Cast: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Austin Pendleton, Mabel Albertson, Sorrel Booke, Stefan Gierasch, Randy Quaid, M. Emmet Walsh, Michael Murphy and John Hillerman.

Credits: Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, scripted by Buck Henry, David Newman and Robert Benton. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:34

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Netflixable? Taraji and Tyler Perry Grab that “Straw” that Breaks a Single Mom’s Back

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Roger Moore

Tyler Perry built his reputation as a champion of Black womanhood. He’s told mostly women’s stories, showcased actresses both famous and obscure and spared no makeup or hairstyling expense for his shiny soap operas and low comedies with a message.

For many years, he went so far as to wear a dress to draw a crowd and help get across his comical melodramas’ points.

With “Straw,” he turns the great Taraji P. Henson loose and spends Netflix’s money on a melodramatic thriller about a woman beaten down by the worst that life, the system and Georgia has to offer.

It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops weeper, full of martrydom, coincidence, over-the-top cruelty, manipulation and plot contrivances. Say what you will about all that’s dumped on our heroine. She “snaps” a lot later than the average human being would at the sort of day she’s had.

Janiyah endures a noisy, dumpy no-AC apartment, noisy neighbors and an endlessly threatening landlady to keep a roof over her and her smart but medicated and fragile special-needs daughter’s heads. She works two jobs, drives a beater and still can’t keep up with the rent, her kids’ medicine or school lunch plan.

And the day we meet her, the straws finally pile up enough to snap the camel’s back.

She’s gotten an eviction notice. But it’s payday at the market where she works. She can cover the bill by 10. Then her daughter’s school calls — $40 in arrears on Aria’s lunch plan. Her boss (Glynn Turman) is in a fury. The school is wondering about the kid’s latest bruise — “She falls a lot.”

It’s raining, and she almost causes an accident. A road raging cop (Tilky Jones) crashes into her and sees to it that she’s blamed and loses her car.

“Make her suffer,” he tells a fellow officer.

Social Services takes her daughter. Her landlord tosses her belongings in the street and her boss fires her with extreme prejudice when she finally returns to work.

“Why are you DOING this?” she wails at every fresh assault, hardship or indignity. We know why. We can see it all unraveling and how it all looks. Janiyah knows, too.

“You don’t know me! You don’t care!”

Her “just get through this” day has gone off the rails. No more “go back to nursing school” dreams. No more chance of providing a better life for her daughter. The day’s cascading cluster of coincidences finish her off.

There’s a back room robbery just as she’s begging that abusive boss for her last check. She fights for the money she needs to just get through this day and a gun goes off.

We either can’t believe our eyes, or roll them right to the back of our heads as she staggers across the street to cash her bloodstained check. Because what would top every over-the-top-thing that happened before but a “bank robbery” and hostage situation that nobody is willing to believe “is all a big misunderstanding?”

Perry’s cooked up a “Falling Down” meets “John Q” mashup, with a whiff of “Dog Day Afternoon” in Janiyah’s single-day saga. Janiyah is trapped in a bank with cops itching for the chance to shoot her and only a half-sympathetic banker (Sherri Shepherd) and single-mom Det. Raymond (Teyana Taylor) willing to hear her out.

Maybe the world will hear her story when a hostage live-streams the stand-off. Or maybe not.

Perry manipulates our sympathies by having characters justify what’s happened and her role in it, as if that lets a woman with blood on her check and a gun she’s pointing at a clerk off.

The script piles on Janiyah to show how life has stacked its deck against her, and then Perry has to bend it, himself and that one cop’s motivations into a pretzel in trying to suggest a way out.

It’s no wonder Perry had to cheat through the ending, as recovering from this much hardship, injustice and cruelty logically is beyond resolution. “She snapped” isn’t righteous or a get-out-of-jail-free card, no matter how bad the day and the life before it have gone.

There’s a message movie here, one that rips “nobody wants to work for anything” and “she made bad choices” judgements, that showcases what a struggle race-based-poverty is and builds sympathy for anyone who has to endure even a fraction of this in their daily life.

Perry’s problem wasn’t in “seeing” this and sympathizing with people like Janiyah. It was piling it all on one person in one day, letting her snap and then blundering his way to a cop-out of a finale.

Perry doesn’t put his finger on the scales on Janiya’s behalf. He balls up his fist and pounds them until they break.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Sherri Shepherd, Teyana Taylor, Mike Merrill, Glynn Turman, Tilky Jones and Sinbad

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tyler Perry. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

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Documentary Review: Guitars, Reverb and a History of “Sound of the Surf”

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Roger Moore

Here’s a fun-fun-fun little documentary about the history of surf music, a movie that remembers the surfing “fad” and enduring appeal of surf culture and the “dripping damp sound” of Fender (usually) guitars pumped through amps that had to grow up to survive at that volume.

“Sound of the Surf” is about surf music, what gave birth to it, what it evolved from, its peak years in the early ’60s, and its ’80s and then ’90s revivals.

So naturally its about Dick Dale, the Lebanese American hep cat who turned “Misirlou” into every guitar player’s wet dream and who invented the fat, thunderous sound of surf intrumentals. But it’s also about The Ventures (“Walk Don’t Run”), The Chantays (“Pipeline”), Link Wray (“Rumble”) and The Surfaris (“Wipeout”).

Duncan, like some of those who appear in his film, has died since the movie was nearly finished. But fan, historian, writer and surf band leader John Blair (Jon & the Nightriders) is here to lead us through coastal California’s Hawaian cultural appropriation in the ’50s and the music that spun out of that.

We meet the original Gidget (Kathy Kohner) and hear about the confluence of events — youth culture, “Gidget” the movie, L.A. rock radio KROQ and young “inland” people “trippin'” down to Balboa’s The Rendezvous Ballroom (Newport Beach) for instrumental music you didn’t just dance to. You “surfin’ stomped” to the rumble Dale and his legion of imitators unleashed from that stage.

You might not guess that surf music spun out of the “improvisational, like surfing” jazz that early ’50s surfers were into, with Henry Mancini’s rhythmic thump theme song to the TV series “Peter Gunn” eventually becoming the template of what was to come.

The music burst out in ’61, that bubble between Elvis and “The Day the Music Died” and The Beatles. It was gone, done in by The Fab Four, “finished” by ’65. Jimi Hendrix’s famous recorded suggestion that we’ll “never hear surf music again” in ’67 could have been a jab or a lament about a sound that was vanishing.

But whatever the music’s elusive place on the pop charts and “American Bandstand,” a generation of bands erupted from garages, and inspired generations to come.

Dale and members of his band, The Del-Tones, as well as The Bel-Airs, Eddie and the Showmen, The Challengers, Kathy Marshall, “the Queen of Surf Music,” Will Glover from The Pyramids (It wasn’t just white kids making this music.) appear here and remember the era, the craze, the landmark venues and the evolution of it all.

It helped that guitar maker and amplifier inventor Leo Fender was close by, ready to hear out suggestions and modify amps to suit the speaker-shredding sound, and survive it.

It’s great seeing and hearing Dale repeat the story he told everybody who interviewed him (including me) after his “Pulp Fiction” inspired ’90s comeback, about how he knew this Middle Eastern song from his youth and thought giving it a manic, guitar-driven “Gene Krupa drumming” beat was a good idea, one more time.

And it’s always fun hearing old surfers and old surf music musicians rag on The Beach Boys, the guys who coopted and sanitized their sound — gave the songs lyrics and put out landmark songs and albums romanticizing and appropriating the culture that California surfers themselves were the first to appropriate.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Dick Dale, Kathy Marshall, John Blair, Bill Medley, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (Flo and Eddie), Will Glover, Kathy Kohner, Quentin Tarantino and Jello Biafra.

Dale and legions of popularizers of the music appear in Thomas Duncan’s film. Journalists and TV hosts, musical contemporaries (Bill Medley) and figures and bands who took up and revived the music, from Los Straightjackets to bands from Japan and Eastern Europe appear and talk up this phenomenon, where it came from and how it keeps coming back.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Duncan. A Vision Films release.

Running time: 1:10

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Netflixable? Marseilles-set “K.O.” Delivers a Glancing Blow

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Roger Moore

“K.O.” is a two-fisted French actioner about an ex-MMA fighter coerced into tracking down the missing son of a man he killed in the octagon.

The fights are as furious as the story is ludicrous.

Long review short, it’s about a Marseilles gang going so far a to shoot and hack its way into a police station to silence an eyewitness to a mass murder. No, that doesn’t scan, add-up or make sense in an ends-justify-the-means sense.

Ciryl Gane of “Den of Thieves: Pantera” is Bastien, a hulking Jack Reacher-sized brawler who bludgeons his way out of a hole to victory in an MMA fight only to have to listen to the cries of his opponent’s wife and son from the arena. Enzo the foe never woke up.

Years later, Bastien is doing manual labor in the South of France, busting rocks on a work crew, when he’s sought out by the dead man’s widow, Emma (Anne Azoulay). Her son, Leo (Maleaume Paquin) acted out on his bitterness and fell into the drug trade. Now, he’s seen something he shouldn’t have –a gangland massacre. An informant for Captain Kenza Alaui (Alice Belaïdi), Leo’s a “squealer” now on the lam from the infamous Manchours clan. Emma wants Bastien to find Leo before the mobs and before the cops — some of whom are sure to have turned.

“His father’s dead because of you,” the widow implores Bastien in French with English subtitles, or dubbed. “You OWE us this!”

That’s how the fighter on a motorcycle runs into the Marseilles native cop Kenza, whose hunch is “The Manchours have moved back in…taken over…neutralized their opposition” in one big massacre. She’s taking all this personally, and that’s what gets her suspended.

“This is police business,” she warns off Bastien.

“That’s not how this works,” he growls. “I’m COMING!”

So it’s a buddy picture, with two mismatched “partners” crashing the clubs — literally — and busting heads left and right as they chase down the missing kid.

The memorable bit here is that club fight. It’s a trendy, popular joint where a link to the missing kid needs to be questioned. And the bouncers in this Marseilles nightclub, dressed in matching white suits with dark open-collar shirts, put life and limb on the line to toss this mouthy, short cop and the He-Man she brought along as muscle. The fight starts and ends, and starts again. And again.

It’s Marseilles. Isn’t there better paying/less dangerous work with smugglers, drug gangs, dock gangs and human traffickers? Or are all those Around the World with Netflix action pix lying?

None of it makes any more sense than the damned sex/love interest shoehorned into the proceedings, or the “Let’s solve all our problems by killing the cops investigating us” climax.

Gane is a magnetic, WWE-sized presence, and Belaïdi is properly fiesty. The kid’s a wash and the villains mostly a generic ethnic mob. Writer-director Antoine Blossier’s narrative takes the time to torture one of the principals, The Andalou (Affif Ben Badra) without adequately building up the character into anybody we’re supposed to pay attention to.

The whole picture plays like that, struggling to squeeze in characters without character development, lost when it isn’t putting Gane through his paces in the sometimes over-the-top brawls.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody, violence

Cast: Ciryl Gane, Alice Belaïdi, Maleaume Paquin, Anne Azoulay and Affif Ben Badra

Credits: Scripted by Antoine Blossier. A Neflix release.

Running time: 1:26

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Documentary Review: A Back to Nature prophet tries to pass on his piece of “Paradise”

Posted on June 8, 2025 by Roger Moore

Western North Carolina has long been a home to those out-of-step with mainstream culture looking for land to settle on, and in many cases, live communally.

When I covered the area for public radio stations and later newspapers, you could stumble into Love Valley and environs in the ’80s and find ’60s hippies holed-up, still living a Back to the Land ethos, some engaged in the business of building and selling hot air balloons.

It was a testing ground for everybody who had an idea of living naturally — underground, earth-covered houses and geodesic domes that needed little or no heat or AC, gardens on your roof and the like.

And over Burnsville way, mountain man/prophet Joe Hollis carried on his 50 years-and-counting “experiment” in growing and gathering nature’s bounty of healing and nourishing herbs in Mountain Garden, an oasis of simple, off-the-grid living in nature.

Hollis took on apprentices and followers whom he taught to identify and use the sea of plants — native and local, Chinese herbs and others — he could name on sight — ginseng and sansai, wild mountain ramps and wasabi.

Asheville filmmaker Garrett Martin spent six months with Hollis, then in his 80s and in failing health, to document what he’s been doing since the early ’70s and his efforts to pass on what he’s learned, what he believes and what he’s built to a new generation.

Martin follows Hollis through the forest’s extended garden, past cabins and yurts and circular hillside bungalows inspired by yurts, pointing out “the plant that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother,” the ginseng and ramps and everything else in his internet-famous “paradise garden.”

We meet apprentices and acolytes, many of whom have settled there, who heard of of Hollis’s “experiment” in living off the land in “the garden where everything you need is there for the taking” and gravitated there.

“The plant wizard” was obessed with ensuring that his “experiment” continue, and that like-minded followers know about this place so that they can come to it, learn from him and his extensive library and perhaps settle there or find some other piece of rural “paradise” to try this themselves.

The film captures Hollis preparing for his own death like the philosopher he was, consulting not hospice workers but those well read in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with his followers scrambling to rebuild the garden’s library and garden after a devastating fire from a few years earlier as a final living tribute to the man.

We meet his ex wife and his son, watch ducks waddle through the forest and creeks and see one slaughtered for a meal. But the overview of life there lacks much in the way of practical application — details on which herbs he’s cultivating, hunting down and turning into “tinctures” and the like for this or that “natural” cure or treatment for what ails you.

Martin gets at the man’s philosophy, his message that humanity is using up and destroying what Gaia, the Earth, has to offer when living in harmony with nature is becoming more necessary by the moment. It’s the pragmatic details — not just “How do you poop?” — but the power grid (Solar?), the diet, means of making the limited money you need there and the like that this brief, touching and sometimes poetic documentary lacks.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joe Hollis

Credits: Garret Martin. A Gravitas Ventures release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:12

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Classic Film Review: Emma and Hugh and Kate and Rickman and Austen and Ang Lee, “Sense and Sensibility” (1995)

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Roger Moore

Watching any movie with Jane Austen ties inevitably sends me back to at least one of my favorites among the films and TV series based on her works. “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” was no exception.

It wouldn’t be “Emma” in her best or second best version I’d drop in on. My favorite Austen adaptation, the glorious Amanda Root, Ciaran Hinds “Persuasion” (NOT the Netflix/Dakota Johnson abomination) isn’t readily available. And who has time to immerse oneself in the definitive “Pride and Prejudice,” the 1995 TV series that launched the Austen fad and Colin Firth mania, and became the defining role in the glorious Jennifer Ehle’s career?

Emma Thompson’s witty and emotional adaptation of “Sense and Sensibilty” followed TV’s “Pride” by a few months, and Ang Lee’s sumptuous film became the gold standard for putting Austen on the big screen in a single film and not a spare-no-detail mini-series.

Touching moments from this classic linger in the memory in this story of “limited prospects” and grand romantic longing in Napoleonic (Empire Era) England. Writer and star Thompson and Kate Winslet, launching herself with a career-making turn, will break your heart and not just once.

But watching it anew, I was bowled over not by the dreaming and dreams dashed Dashwood sisters, who still move and make us identify with their crushes, missteps and heartfelt desperation to “marry for love” and a tidy inheritance. It’s the men who try to measure up to them that impress the most.

If there was ever a more romantic entrance in a period piece than Alan Rickman, galloping into the frame as Col. Brandon, all dash and hidden heartbreak and flowing hair, I can’t recall it. Famous on film as Everyvillain at the time, thanks to “Die Hard” and the Costner “Robin Hood,” Rickman practically reinvents himself in this portrait of gentility, grand gestures and upper class virility.

His Col. Brandon makes a pointed contrast not just to the younger and more handsome John Willoughby, played by tall, dark and handsome Greg Wise, his rival for the love of young Marianne (Winslet). Thompson cast him as counterpart to the shrinking violet she talked her pal Hugh Grant into playing, Edward Ferrars, her character’s love interest.

Rickman’s Brandon is chivalrous, charismatic, smitten with Marianne and gallant enough to accept her interest in a younger suitor is the polar opposite of Grant’s Ferrars.

Brandon dominates the room, even when he’s not in it. Ferrars physically shrinks when he walks into the company of women or anybody else. Watch the way Grant carries himself, shoulders hunched in, slightly bent, self-effacing and modest to a fault.

Rickman’s Brandon looks like a safe suspect if one was casting about looking for The Scarlet Pimpernel, at his most manly when on horseback. Grant in the saddle reminds one of the crack Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder” makes in the period piece sitcom by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. He rides “a horse rather less well than another horse would.”

The story is quintessential Austen. Three sisters (Thompson, Winslet and Myrian Henry Francois) and their widowed mother (Gemma Jones, terrific) are left in the lurch when their stepfather/husband (Tom Wilkinson) dies and legally, they’re left out of the will.

Their older half-brother (James Fleet) promised to look after them, but his greedy wife (Harriet Walter, perfectly vile) gradually talks him out of that charitable obligation.

If only Miss Elinor (Thompson) could meet a handsome heir who looks like Hugh Grant, but whose family won’t disown him for marrying “beneath” his station. If only younger sister Marianne’s (Winslet) head could be turned by someone rich and seemingly available like Willoughby/Wise.

If only their older, better off relatives (Elizabeth Spriggs and Robert Hardy) had stopped with the lovely gesture of taking the family in and providing them with a comfy cottage, instead of repeatedly embarrassing the girls by laying all their desperate-to-marry business out there to one and all.

The supporting characters provide the film’s comic relief, with stage veteran Spriggs an unsufferable, well-intentioned delight and Imogen Stubbs bringing Elinor’s rival for Ferrars, Lucy Steele, to dizzy, shallow insufferable light and Imelda Staunton and Hugh Laurie drawing blood as a chatterbox and her droll, muttering and insulting mate.

“Oh, if only this rain would stop!”

“If only YOU would stop.”

Thompson created Mr. Jennings as a character, made him a fine accomplice to Mrs. Jennings, and gave herself the film’s first zinger, on hearing her sister’s downcast piano playing in their house of mourning.

“Marianne, could you play something else? Mamma has been weeping since breakfast.

Grant has never been more charming, a shy suitor who indulges the family’s youngest daughter with role playing which he self-mocks when confessing what he’s doing to her sisters.

“She’s, eh, heading an expedition to China shortly. I am to go as her servant, but only on the understanding that I am to be very badly treated.”

Rickman is Thompson’s true match as a romantic lead, a man of action who sweeps into action when his moment arrives, and who cannot sit idly by waiting for a doctor to save his unrequited beloved, Marianne. Surely Elinor has some task he can fulfill while waiting.

“Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.”

“Sense and Sensibility” only collected one Oscar back in 1996, for Thompson’s adaptation of the Austen novel. When your competition is “Dead Man Walking,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “The Usual Suspects” and “Braveheart,” that’s understandable.

But this sunny period piece has a timelessness that has outlived some members of its cast, and more than one renewal of the great ongoing Jane Austen fad. Thompson and Ang Lee made perhaps the definitive Austen film, more in touch with its times than “Emma,” more romantic than “Pride and Prejudice” (Elizabeth Bennett falls hard for Mr. Darcy AFTER she takes in his mansion and estate), more fun than “Persuasion” or most any Austen adaptation that has come since.

star

Rating: PG

Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Harriet Walter, Gemma Jones, James Fleet, Tom Wilkinson, Imelda Staunton, Greg Wise, Hugh Laurie, Imogen Stubbs and Alan Rickman.

Credits: Directed by Ang Lee, scripted by Emma Thompson, based on the novel by Jane Austen. A Columbia Pictures release on Apple TV+, Amazon, Hulu, other streamers

Running time: 2:16

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Netflixable? Hell hath no Fury like a Mother “Uninvited” to the Home of Her Daughter’s Killers

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Uninvited” is a Filipino revenge thriller, a slow but solid B-picture slicked up to pass for an A-feature.

Vilma Santos stars as a grieving mother who sets out to avenge a student-daughter “defiled” and murdered by a mob boss, a mobster with a lot of underlings who make such assaults possible.

Lilia has gotten herself invited to Boss Guilly’s (Aga Muhlach) birthday party. She passes herself off as the head of a foundation that flattered the mobster’s moll/wife (Mylene Dizon) with a donation to her favorite charity. But Lilia, stylishly dressed in black, has more than just mingling on her mind.

The father of another victim of Guilly’s murderous gang suggests she add his child to her “lawyer’s” brief of accusations.

“A lawyer won’t be necessary for my plan,” she says (in Tagalog, Spanish and English, with subtitles).

Fiftysomething Vilma tracks her progress with an interior monologue. Sometimes it’s for herself — “A good thing I don’t have my gun with me.” And sometimes she’s talking to her dead daughter Lily (Gabby Padilla). “Just four left, sweetie.”

Dodo Dayao’s script sets the story in the birthday party fictive present, with long flashbacks showing Lilia’s loss, her despair at her daughter’s seemingly random grabbed-from-the-street fate and the ways she plans for revenge.

Director Dan Villegas takes his sweet time getting around to those flashbacks and that plan. It’s a slow-pokey thriller that takes an hour of introductions — constantly changing points of view showing us the depravity of the “boss,” the venality of his lieutenants, his wife, his daughter (Nadine Lustre), a rival, a dirty cop and others — before the revenge and the “plan” come together.

No, it’s not wholly logical. But a little old lady — Santos is 70+ and thus a bit old to be playing the mother of a coed — with a big knife and a furious temper is still somebody to be reckoned with.

The avenger may pause for muttered condemnations and accusations, but once the killing starts this short thriller starts to play as intended — taut, mean and bloody.

The motivation isn’t new. The villain is generic. And the bloodshed isn’t particularly inventive. But running over a murderous accomplice, and then backing over him a couple of times, is always going to play as satisfying.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence including rape, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Vilma Santos, Aga Muhlach, Nadine Lustre, Mylene Dizon,
RK Bagatsing, Ketchup Eusebio, Gio Alvarez, Cholo Barretto and Gabby Padilla.

Credits: Directed by Dan Villegas, scripted by Dodo Dayao. A Warner Bros./Netflix release.

Runnin time: 1:33

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Movie Review: A Twee Parable for the Age of the Oligarch — “The Phoenician Scheme”

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Roger Moore

When he’s “on,” Wes Anderson’s films are giddy, deadpan delights, sparkling with wit and touching in the vulnerable and comically absurd human foibles they celebrate.

But when he’s “off,” brace yourself for 100 minutes of production-designed preciousness, airless laughs that stop landing and strained attempts at “meaning” above and beyond all the “twee.”

The dry, allegorical period piece “The Phoenician Scheme” is on the same arid plane as “Asteroid City,” and a far cry from the droll, quirky peak Anderson achieved with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or the romantic, eccentric nostalgia of “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

I thought he’d found his best destiny with the Roald Dahl shorts he packaged for Netflix under the title “The World of Henry Sugar and Three More.” And the cinema is a richer place whenever he turns his attention to stop-motion animations like “The Fantastic Mister Fox” and “Isle of Dogs.”

But “Phoenician” indulges his worst instincts, an over-populated — his repertory company is huge and getting moreso — dry and often dull bore, a waste of “names” and talent that feels starved of comic oxygen or inscrutable “meaning,” start to finish.

Fans of any chance to board the train or 1950 propeller plane trip to Wes Andersonland can always find moments and comic touches to relish. Star Benicio del Toro and Riz Ahmed as a Saudi prince play a game of basketball “HORSE” — “First to five wins.” — with Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston in an unfinished train tunnel, with the hoop attached to the end of a rail car. Hilarously nonsensical shouting matches between shady financiers named “Marseilles Bob” (Mathieu Amalric) and Marty (Jeffrey Wright) tickle, as Wright has mastered Anderson rat-a-tat patter better than anyone. The latest hapless confessions of love from Michael Cera (his “brand”) to an inexpressive novitiate nun and heiress (Mia Threapleton), with Cera sporting a Norwegian accent, compensates for the abence of Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman in this latest collaboration between Anderson and Schwartzman’s cousin, Roman Coppola.

Naming his villainous hero Zsa Zsa Korda, riffing on a famous for being famous Hungarian American and an accomplished Anglo Hungarian British filmmaker of the ’40s, serving up Benedict Cumberbatch as a villain wearing Orson Welles’ eyebrow and forked beard from the cult classic “Mister Arkadin” are among the nods to the film buffs in Anderson’s fanbase.

It’s just that the cameos — F. Murray Abraham and Willem Dafoe as “angels” debating the anti-hero’s fate before “God” (Bill Murray) — and screwy bits don’t add up to much or much that amuses or enlightens this time out.

Korda (del Toro) is a shady 1950 developer/financier whom the world’s financial powers that be — seen plotting in a “war room” council headed by Rupert Friend — cannot seem to bring to heel. Korda survives plane crashes and other assassination attempts because he has to in order to pull off his biggest gamble ever.

The Phoenician Scheme is a massive Middle Eastern modernization that includes The Trans Desert Inland Waterway (canal), The Trans Basin Hydroelectric Embankment (a dam) and the almost-finished Trans-Mountain Locomotive Tunnel.

Korda, fretting over the infighting among his assorted financiers and others who want him dead, summons his deadpan daughter Liesl (Threapleton) from her convent to assume the role of heir to his empire.

He has nine sons he barely connects with — “I bought Jasper a crossbow.” — so the young woman who thinks he killed her mother — “They say you murdered all your wives.” — is to take over.

She will “pray on the matter,” and accompany him and his all-things-insectoid tutor (Cera) as Korda charms an Arab prince (Ahmed), wrangles with the Sacremento Consortium (Hanks and Cranston, California brothers named Reagan and Leland) and arm-twists Marseilles Bob (Amalric) and The Newark Syndicate (Wright) to see to it that his scheme bears fruit.

Those “Gaps” in Korda’s plans are literal — the rail lines don’t quite link up in the tunnel — and financial/metaphorical.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Scarlett Johansson play women from Korda’s life. Every near death experience he survives has him envisioning angels (Abraham, Dafoe, etc) debating his fate in black and white, and every time he recovers, Korda peppers his offspring, employees and partners with worthless aphorisms, life advice that doesn’t really scan.

“Break, but don’t bend.” Don’t just buy art, “always buy masterpieces.” And “help yourself to a hand grenade.”

Every line is delivered with the same flat deadpan that’s been Anderson’s trademark since Gwyneth Paltrow and Bill Murray perfected it. Every setting — even the most austere ones — are designed and decorated to airless perfection.

Hope pops up whenever a Johansson or Richard Ayode makes an entrance (as a freedom fighter shooting up Marseilles Bob’s Casablanaca nightclub). But nothing much comes from the scores of cameos this time out.

There are chuckles here and there, but one gets the sense that this parable about an oligarch who might grow a heart — or get what he has coming to him — was about three drafts shy of a finished script. Or that Anderson and co-writer Coppola never had the nerve to tackle whatever it is that they were going for.

Like any fan, I’ll watch anything Anderson turns his attention to. But all the stars and star cameos, all the jaunty, classical music needle drops, all the del Toro drollery, the “lost boys” cadre of Korda kids and the Middle Eastern history hinted at in the “schemes” can’t paper over how flat and empty this “scheme” turns out to be.

Rating: PG-13, violence, nudity, smoking, “suggestive material”

Cast: Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Jeffrey Wright, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Richard Ayode, Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Charlotte Gainsbourg, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Murray, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hanks.

Credits: Directed by Wes Anderson, scripted by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:41

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