Been dying to see this bad boy, opening wide Friday.
Satire of the “Swept Away” school?
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She has a chip on her shoulder. We can see it in her eyes and hear it in her sarcasm when dealing with a case worker at the welfare office.
And there’s something about that child at her feet that isn’t quite right. The kid doesn’t speak, with a long mop of unkempt hair hiding the eyes in the middle of manic moments of acting-out. Mom seems barely interested in keeping the child under control.
She drives a forklift at work and brings men home to her latchkey 8-9 year-old.
“My dad is going to f— you up when he sees you,” the kid warns tonight’s “date.” Later, Mom is warned to “speak loudly to” a teacher because “he’s going deaf,” we come to appreciate the child’s wit and mean streak.
But it’s not until “Tom” is expelled from school that we figure out that this is “The Other Tom,” that he’s a boy and that he’s the boy whom this film is about.
And what’s more, “The Other Tom” isn’t about gender dysphoria, no matter how feminine Tom (Israel Rodriguez) looks and sounds, no matter who the teacher mistakes him for in class.
Is that an unintentional bit of misdirection from co-writers/directors Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo? n This movie trips-up expectations more than once as we see this story of a troubled (ADHD) child and the struggling mother who tries to figure out the medication the school system suggests, or if it is “changing” Tom for the worse.
Which Tom might mother Elena (Julia Chavez) figure is the “real” Tom, and which “The Other Tom?”
The quiet, immersive film is largely seen from Elena’s point of view, not the warmest single mom, a woman with a short temper and no patience for a child constantly testing her.
She barely reacts to his many torrents of “I HATE yous.”
Tom lashes out, time and again, and her neglect/reward style of childrearing isn’t cutting it. The school intervenes after he hits a teacher in fury over something he’s sure his mother forgot to pack for him for class. Tom’s “impulsive, aggressive, abnormal behavior” is disrupting school and causing Tom to fail.
His chilly mother can only mollify him. The system can’t deal with him and teachers and administrators are pretty blunt with Elena about what he needs, and in what doses.
“The Other Tom” struggles to stay on the fence about what is best for the child, who is plainly out of control and miserable “before,” and troubled but “manageable” and seemingly happier “after.”
The school system in this film is portrayed as officious and inflexible, almost hellbent on medicating this kid “for his own good.” His mother comes off as the queen of bad decisions — about men, about who she takes advice from about her son, about the promises she makes Tom that she can’t or won’t keep.
But the disorienting nature of “The Other Tom” is one of its strengths. Even parents with access to all the information (and sometimes disinformation) have an impossible time wrestling with this decision, the fear of its consequences and the alarm and outrage any parent would feel if it seems “the system” is forcing something on her kid that she can’t fully understand.
When Elena reels from one side of the debate to the other, we reel with her. Every time she makes a choice the film seems to agree it’s the right one, although we’re allowed to we ponder consequences Elena doesn’t grasp, and we wonder if Mom’s rashness is just a milder form of Tom’s problem.
Even as the film wanders about and the emotional bond between mother and child is seriously lacking i this story and these performances, there’s still something engrossing about seeing a mother’s journey through the trials and errors of ensuring her child has an opportunity to learn and at least a shot at a normal, healthy and happy life — with or without pills.
Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Julia Chavez, Israel Rodriguez
Credits: Scripted and directed by Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo. An Outsider release.
Nov. 13. Looks good. Looks like Oscar bait. From A24.
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Tony winning actress, writer and director Sarah Jones turns her “Sell/Buy/Date” sex work show into a 100 minute “teachable moment” movie. She uses “protests” against the just-announced “film version” of the play as an impetus to exploring the subject further via professionals involved in the work, porn actors to pole dancers to prostitutes.
Jones’ noble intentions lead to some informative interactions and confessions kind of buried in a mockumentary that starts humorous and talks its subject to death long before “That’s a wrap.”
It’s a laudable effort packed with facts and eye-opening perspectives. But the glib packaging makes for a mostly humor-starved, clinical and tedious film. If nothing else, she underscores the point that this can of worms promises to open. “It’s a complex” subject.
Jones begins by introducing us to characters from her play — Lorraine, her “Jewish bubbe” mascot and conscience, Bella a “sex work studies” coed, Nereida, a Dominican/Puerto Rican civil rights activist and Rashid, a young Uber driver whose guise she assumes to have somebody “street” to bounce a lot of these ideas off and get “KnowwhutI’msayin’?” takes.
The announcement that her long-running show might become a movie earns her Internet blowback, which elderly Lorraine sums up as almost fitting for someone who was “so busy trying to be ‘the wokest,'” and got lost in this subject she still doesn’t know everything about.
So Sarah and her entourage visit a “sex positive pole dancing class” and hear from Tish Roberts, a human rights activist “still walking in that life” as a prostitute.
She meets with Lotus Lain, a porn actress and sex worker advocate, who warns Sarah “You’re about to get yourself canceled!” A quick Instagram pose with Lotus can fix that.
We and Sarah take a tour of Nevada’s famed “Chicken Ranch” legal brothel, led by Alice Little, a prostitute and (BDSM) “educator.”
We hear from a transgender sex worker, and from porn actor/”Adult Media Monetizer” and former Biohazzard rock star Evan Seinfeld. Sarah sits down with Indigenous women activists who point to the “man camps” of the labor intensive oil and construction industries being a magnet and impetus for sex work, especially in nearby Native American reservations.
Jones, like the viewer, gets a bit of whiplash from the “their business is them” self-exploitation view of women selling their looks and bodies, and the opposing view that those profiting the most and suffering the fewest consequences are the men who run the brothels and the “johns” who are barely punished for soliciting sex workers.
Transgender sex worker and activist Esperanza von Secca lectures our playwright, actress and filmmaker about what a “violent business this is for women to be in.”
It’s a lot to “unpack,” Sarah says as herself. And her various guises from the play react differently to each new piece of information, each shift in point of view from “empowering” and giving women “agency” to what an “exploitive” “trap” this work often is.
Also muddying the waters is the ever shifting language of this subject, and the vaguely less pejorative euphemisms thrown about here are enough to make some worry about”doing the work” to keep up with the latest terminology or vex the hell out of anyone fretting about “weasel words” taking over the conversation.
“Still walking in that life?” Give me a break.
A couple of film stars — Rosario Dawson and Bryan Crantson — show up for “advice to Sarah/support Sarah” cameos.
Taken as a whole and received as a film, “Sell/Buy/Date” isn’t a particularly graceful vehicle to disseminate all this new-to-most-of-us information and perspectives. The connecting scenes with Sarah in disguise as Rashid or Bella, etc. feel clumsy and grow less amusing the longer “Sell/Buy/Date” goes on.
The documentary material is informative and mind-opening. The mockumentary surrounding it is a bit of a drag, and lets the movie down.
Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity
Credits: Sarah Jones, Rosario Dawson, Evan Seinfeld, Alice Little, Amy Bond, Esperanza Fonseca and Bryan Cranston.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah Jones. A Cinedigm release.
Note the clever use of an orchestral version of the Stones’ “Paint it Black” as tasty subtext. Tim Burton has given Jenna Ortega a terrific star vehicle. Nov. 23, we find out if it paid off.
That Romeo Montague is one fickle fop in “Rosaline,” a fanciful, lighthearted riff on The Girl He Left on that Other Balcony.
An adaptation of Rebecca Serle’s novel, it conjures up an unseen character from Shakespeare’s play, a girl young blood Romeo pined for until he spied the fair Rosaline’s fetching cousin. Serle gives us a plucky Rosaline, young woman with smarts and wits and agency, and makes her a comical wild card in that tale of “woe…of Juliet and her Romeo.”
Watchable, reasonably well-cast and handsomely mounted, the three letters that come to mind most often in describing “Rosaline” are “ish.”
It’s funny-ish. Charming-ish. Clever-ish. And it ends with a flourish that almost rectifies the shortcomings that precede it.
Kaitlyn Deaver of “Booksmart” is our title heroine, a spunky “modern” young woman chafing at the restraints and “arranged marriage” machinations of her Capulet padre (Bradley Whitford).
“I’m too YOUNG to get married!” “LOOK at you. You’re almost too OLD!”
And then she has to go and get herself swept off her feet by the smooth-talking swooner, Romeo (Kyle Allen).
“I swear at sight that I never saw true beauty until this night!”
She is smitten, but not without reservations. “Why are you TALKING like that?”
Yes, this is a smart-arsed YA take on this tale of woe, complete with smatterings of profanity (a couple of f-bombs included) and a recognition that The Bard of Avon created the theater’s first-ever gay BFFs. Here, it’s Paris (Spencer Stevenson), Rosaline’s confidante.
But her mentor is her nurse, given snide spark by Minnie Driver. Sure, believe “together forever.” But “Bloody hell, cover your TRACKS woman.”
A sailing date with Dad’s one suitable “arranged” suitor (Sean Teale) is where Rosaline’s designs on Romeo are derailed. Weather delays mean that it is Juliet — played by onetime “Dora the Explorer” Isabela Merced — whom Romeo spies and tumbles for, forgetting all thoughts of fair Rosaline. She even gets to hear him using the same lines he used on her.
The cad.
The fun stuff here is Serle and the filmmakers mashing up of the plays — a little “Taming of the Shrew,” a hint of “All’s Well that Ends Well.” I got a small kick out of Rosaline trying to break up the big Montague-Capulet swordfight on the square.
“You ALL have big swords. Why don’t you put’em back in your pants, now?”
The “cutesy” touches are reminiscent of “A Knight’s Tale,” throwing in modern profanity and setting this or that moment to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” or Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love).”
You’d think with the director of “Yes, God, Yes” (Karen Maine) behind the camera, this comedy would take flight. Too much of what’s here stops just short of paying off with a big laugh. Blame the script or the tentative players (aside from Deaver, none of the younger cast members knows how to stick a punchline), but for all its intended charm and hilarity, “Rosaline” always settles for “ish.”
Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief strong language (f-bombs, etc).
Cast: Kaithlyn Deaver, Isabela Merced, Sean Teale, Kyle Allen, Bradley Whitford, Spencer Stevenson, Christopher MacDonald and Minnie Driver.
Credits: Directed by Karen Maine, scripted by Scott Neistadter and Michael H. Weber, cased on a novel by Rebecca Serle. A 20th Century film, a Hulu release.
“The Accursed” is the kind of by-the-book demonic “curse” movie that you just know somebody’s going to have to consult a “book” at some point.
The cover is always leather. Or perhaps human skin? There’s always a pentagram on it, and sort of evil illuminated manuscript pages contained therein.
In this generic and generally uninteresting meander of a movie, the book only shows up late and plays no real role in the outcome. But as random as it begins and ends, as many peripheral characters get mixed-up in the messy goings-on, the book shows up because you’ve simply got to have one. Every hack horror screenwriter knows that, even if he has to grimace away the decision to name his movie the same as a film that came out just last year.
A mother (Alexis Knapp) and daughter (Kai Phillippe-Knapp) visit a “witch” in the land of live oaks bathed in Spanish moss.
“Don’t come inside until the screaming starts,” Mom orders. She may be requesting a curse cast upon some rival — “I want the Devil himself to take possession of her.!” — but we start to smell a trap. For the witch.
“Three months later” the new nurse and newly motherless Elly (Sarah Grey) takes a job as in home caregiver to an aged, catatonic crone (’70s and ’80s cinema and TV mainstay Meg Foster). The officious martinet doing the hiring (Mena Suvari) insists that Elly not leave the remote house while her charge is still breathing. Maybe that’ll be just for the weekend. But she gives Elly and the pal Beth who drops her off (Sarah Dumont) the “all kindsa wrong” creeps.
Something doesn’t add up. And it’s going to take Elly, Beth, the mother-and-daughter we met in the first scene, and that pentagrammed book to sort out.
We assume that’s how this will find its way to coherence, excitement, blood and revenge.
The effects — mainly a gnarled hand that crawls out of this or that mouth, a hand attached to something even bigger, and makes its way into another — are pretty good.
The cast isn’t bad, by B-movie horror standards.
But the confusing set-up, with a prologue that whatever the script back-engineers it to do seems unnecessary, hamper this and the frights and confrontations are rarely more than the mildest chills.
It’s hard to work up much enthusiasm for the second “Accursed” to come our way in less than a year, by-the-book or not.
Rating: unrated, bloody violence
Cast: Sarah Grey, Sarah Dumont, Alexis Knapp, Meg Foster and Mena Suvari
Credits: Directed by Kevin Lewis, scripted by Rob Kennedy. A Screen Media release.
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