There’s got to be some truth to the myth that the phrase “an acquired taste” was first applied, in Italian, to that guru of gore Dario Argento and eventually translated into English.
Which makes his latest, “Dark Glasses,” something of a puzzle. It’s one of the most conventional thrillers we’ve ever seen from the creator of “Deep Red,” “Demons” and “Suspiria.” Sure, it’s gory. The opening murder in this serial killer story is practically a beheading. But the plot, characters and deaths served up are pretty damned humdrum by Argento standards.
A guy in a van is running around, wearing a mask and killing Roman prostitutes. But one victim, Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli) is tough enough and lucky enough to survive his assault, which ended in a car crash that he caused. It left Diana blind and a little boy (Andrea Zhang) orphaned.
The killing spree started the evening after a solar eclipse, so Diana was already in “Dark Glasses (Occhiali Neri)” due to a careless glance. Now, she can’t see at all. She’s assigned a seeing-eye Alsatian and a “trainer” (Asia Argento).
The tactless/hapless cops (Mario Pirello plays the lead detective) are wondering “Did he have it in for you?” (in Italian with English subtitles) owing to her line of work, which just gets Diana’s back up. As she struggles to learn this new life, she guiltily goes to see the little boy whose parents were killed when she was rammed into their car.
When little Chin (Zhang) flees Catholic school, it’s Diana he tracks down. Great. The blind woman’s circle of potential victims just grew again. Because you know the murderer is coming for her.
Argento may stay on brand with this film, with a few gory moments amid its violence. But he’s rarely tamed things to the point where they’re pro forma, dull and preordained.
He takes us point by point through an unexciting escalation of perils Diana and Chin face as they flee their fates. He somehow manages to achieve a fine denouement. And then he ruins even that with a sappy epilogue.
Kids movies opening during the school year typically don’t do much business on “preview” Thursday nights. So let’s make as much out of the low numbers “Lyle Lyle Crocodile” scored this Thursday.
So “Lyle” is probably heading towards something like parity with “Smile,” which is earning at a $13-17 million second weekend take. They’re getting their data from Sony, which knows it isn’t Pixar, and may be lowballing it. “Lyle” should very well clear $15, but we’ll see. $11-12 says Deadline, as of Sat. AM.
Parents have been waiting for a good family film to take the kids to, which explains the otherwise inexplicable run of the animated “Super Pets” hit. Reviews haven’t been bad — not dazzling, but not bad. I found “Lyle” endearing, cute and charming.
“Amsterdam” I called “a hot mess.” And I wasn’t alone. Most critics were impressed with the all-star cast and the messaging of this convoluted 1930s mystery built around sinister real-life events that almost overtook America and had their way with much of the rest of the world. But David O. Russell occasionally swings and misses (Remember “Joy?” “I Heart Huckabees?”) and most certainly did here with a cluttered, confusing, info-packed picture that aims for laughs if often doesn’t land.
It’ll manage $7 million, tops, unless word REALLY gets around.
“The Woman King” and “Don’t Worry, Darling” are still battling for third and fourth places, with “King” still destined for a higher overall take when all’s said and done, but narrowly trailing “Darling” because “King” has been in theaters longer.
“Bros”still isn’t doing much business. Billy Eichner blames “some parts of the country” not wanting to see a gay romance, and he could very well be right. But a film with zero star power — he’s not exactly a household name in “flyover country” — and little in the way of warmth as it seeks to show off the first “true” gay rom-com, R-rated to boot, had a lower upside than the studio figured and word of mouth isn’t going to broaden its appeal. It plays for the urban populace it represents and the gay audience it’s about — well, some of those audiences, anyway — and that’s that.
As always, I’ll be updating these figures later Saturday and into Sunday.
Tales of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of World War II long ago entered the realm of legend, and even became a punchline as the decades passed and the myth of the “fanatics” still holding out in the Philippines approached the realm of the ridiculous.
But every so often a new “survivor” turned up, on into the 1970s, giving this bizarre, almost laughable “devotion to duty” a moment in the spotlight of cold, hard reality.
“Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” is an epic-length story of one of the last holdouts. This French production is slightly sentimentalized, perhaps for the Japanese marketplace, but grimly realistic in its depiction of the moral dilemma such men faced as evidence grew that they were fighting a war that was over. And that they were “fighting” against civilians they were robbing, terrorizing and even murdering.
“Onoda” is framed in the 1974 “present,” as the aged Hiroo Onoda (Kanji Tsuda) is pondering a young Japanese man who makes overtures to him via a barracks ballad he used to know in his youth, a song the young man plays on a bulky newfangled cassette player on the edge of the jungle. “Onoda” allows us to contemplate, along with authorities at the time, what combination of “evidence” will convince Onoda to approach these strangers reaching out to him, directly. In the three decades since World War II ended his actions on the Philippine island of Lubang have become notorious, and the Japanese government has identified who the man out there sabotaging crops and killing farmers is.
The bulk of French director Arthur Harrari’s saga is set in the life Onoda lived up to that point, his recruitment in the last year of the war, when some were accepting the fact that Japan was losing, but were sure that by sacrificing themselves and making the cost of attacking the Japanese home islands too daunting and too great, they might win a negotiated peace.
Young Onoda (Yûya Endô) had longed to become a pilot, but wasn’t keen on the pitch to become a kamikaze. Add that to the fact that he was afraid of heights and he wouldn’t need to sacrifice himself to serve the Homeland and the Emperor.
A mysterious Major Tanaguchi (Issei Ogata) assures Hiroo that “there are other ways to be proud,” in Japanese with English subtitles. He has picked up on Hiroo’s hesitation at every suggestion that he “die for your emperor.” Tanaguchi is starting a “secret program” that will train Lt. Onoda how to “think for yourself,” for a type of war that will entail “lies, treason, humiliation,” where nothing Onoda does will be considered “off limits.”
Best of all for Onoda, “You are forbidden from killing yourself.” He was to fight, hide and keep his unit actively engaged, because eventually, “three years, five years, however long it takes, we will come back for you.”
It’s shocking to learn that these hold outs weren’t just random, dogged Japanese fighting men fanatically dedicated to fight to the death. They were trained to do it, specialists being sent to the still unconquered smaller islands of the Philippines archipelago well into 1945. Much of the fascist Japanese leadership believed the battle on their home islands would go on for years, and that their fanatical refusal to surrender would break the Allies’ will, even at that late stage of the war.
That’s a fascinating insight that “Onoda” brings to light, adding belated evidence to the moral dilemma of dropping atomic bombs on Japan to make them quit.
But on Lubang in the Philippines, Lt. Onoda and his men do not quit, and they are very slow to figure out Japan did. He arrives just before the American assault on Lubang begins, a pedantic untested unconventional combat expert who irritates his future comrades and even usurps command from the ailing captain ostensibly in charge. When the the shelling starts and Americans come ashore, the suicide boats some have been training to pilot are destroyed and Onoda leads his tiny cadre of survivors into the jungle to begin their guerilla war.
Harari and his cast play out the shifting stresses caused by spending years hiding in caves where they had stashed caches of arms and food, wearing their uniforms threadbare as they steal food and destroy that which they can’t carry with fire, “smoke signals” that will tell the Japanese military that they’re still carrying the fight to the enemy.
There are quarrels and fights among their ever-shrinking ranks. They’re told “the war is over” more than once. Some start to question who it is they’re shooting.
“What if we killed people we’re not longer at war with?”
The acting is good across the board, but the emphasis here is on story, logistics — how they were able to stay in the field for so long — and the moral dilemma of men who have to know, by the time they’re hearing rock’n roll on captured radios, that they’re murdering civilians.
The “secret glory” they were promised is a lie. The permission to wage war on their own terms and not according to Western civilization’s morality, common throughout the Japanese Army, eats at some of them.
That makes “Onoda” unlike any other World War II treatment of Japanese fighting men to ever play in the West, a grim condemnation of “orders” and those whose existence has narrowed down to “just following” them.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence
Cast: Yûya Endô, Kanji Tsuda and Issei Ogata
Credits: Directed by Arthur Harari, Arthur Harari, Vincent Poymiro and Bernard Cendron. A Dark Star release.
A meteor streaks through the opening credits, strikes in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, and a hiking couple must contend with what crawls out of it in “Significant Other.”
So what can co-writers/directors Robert Olsen and Dan Berk throw at us that will surprise, shock, amuse and delight from that all-too-familiar set up? Aside from Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) and Jake Lacy (“Obvious Child”)?
Not a whole lot, it turns out. And not much that adds up to anything novel.
Monroe and Lacy play a troubled couple heading into the woods for a hiking/camping trip. He’s big on mansplaining. She’s taking pills for anxiety attacks and trying to tamp down her many fears for this new experience. He minimizes what she’s going through, as a way of reassuring her.
“Nothing scary about it…You’re not going to regret this.”
When she answers his teasing with “You’re a disgusting monster,” we’re supposed to go, “Oh, so THAT’s what foreshadowing is!”
As if the kid at the diner in Portlandia’s version of “Deliverance” asking “Did you see the red star come down?” wasn’t lesson enough.
Berk and Olsen try their best to upend expectations, sometimes even tripping over their own movie’s “rules” and logic. Somebody has an encounter. Somebody says “I haven’t been feeling myself.”
SOMEbody feels the need to explain her or himself to the “significant other” and the audience –after the tentacled alien has taken over his or her body. That’s easily the most absurd scene in a thriller that takes a turn towards dark comedy without bothering to get the “thriller” part right first.
Monroe hasn’t been pigeon-holed into this genre, but she hasn’t broken free of it, either. Lacy’s presence prefigures the movie’s attempted turn towards the comical. They don’t quite work as a couple, partly because he’s been around even longer than her, and she still sounds like a teenager. That makes the age-gap in the relationship seem ickier than it might have on paper (she’s 29, he’s 37).
A clever (and foreshadowed) touch or two notwithstanding, in the end, the filmmakers’ attempts at misdirecting the viewer’s expectations fail and the movie’s endless “on the nose” characters, moments and lines of dialogue overwhelm it.
“Nothing scary about it” about covers it.
Rating: R, for violence, gore and (profanity).
Cast: Maika Monroe, Jake Lacy
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen. A Paramount+ release.
There was a brief splash when this gimmicky accordion-packing *love goddess* and “petite flower” could rightly be considered the funniest woman alive. Judy Tenuta had catch phrases — “It could happen!” — and a pet name for her fans, “Hey PIGS.” She had a “Pope Song” and a few killer bits and a niche that was all hers, baby.
She co-hosted that NBC music videos show with Sonny Bono once, and Judy showed up as Cher and he stomped off the set. Hilarious. And I should add, she was a seriously funny interview. I caught up with her on tour, at her post-Sonny peak (He wanted to be taken seriously so’s he could run for Congress. She called him “That INFANT!”). The interview read funny — because I quoted her AT LENGTH — so funny that I used a clipping of it to get newspaper jobs for YEARS afterwards.
Yeah, this Pig owes Judy. Big.
Look at her interaction with the audience in this just-before-blowing-up MTV Golden Age performance. She had it. “Funny in her bones,” as the saying goes. Ellen DeGeneres was her contemporary and had a bigger upside and longer career. Judy? She burned like phosphorous, too hot and narrow in appeal to last. But damn. Helena Bonham Carter with Jersey accent and an accordion.
Cancer took her at 72, which is entirely too young.
The opening narration to “Bromates” — a lifeless and almost laughless laugher about two jilted-by-their-girlfriends dudes who move in together — raises expectations that the movie never delivers on. Because Snoop Dogg performs it.
He shows up onscreen, as himself, very late in the picture, in a self-mocking turn that’s almost funny. And one cannot help but notice how that’s what the film hasn’t been for all of the preceding 90 minutes — “almost funny.” It rarely even comes close.
Nebbishy Josh Brener, best known as a high-pitched voice actor on a lot of TV animation, is Sid, living his best life as a Texas solar panel salesman, something a prologue suggests he was destined to do even as a kid. He was probably destined to hook up with an “influencer” (Jessica Lowe) who walks all over him, and even cheats with the Bavarian puppeteer who lives next door.
Hollywood’s go-to funny man for “sidekick” roles, Lil Rel Howery ,co-stars here as Jonesie, a horndog whose “testing our new sex swing” bit with a stripper sends his girlfriend packing.
Both single again? They should save some money and move in together. Not as “roommates” or some sort of “Odd Couple,” but as “Bromates.”
Poor Lil Rel has to use the word repeatedly in this lumbering, heavy-handed script that can’t manage a laugh to save it’s arse. “As your bromate…It’s my bromate right,” etc.
When Jonesie gets over his http://www.nearsightedbigbootywomen.com obsession, he and their other childhood pals — gay “Runway Dave” (Brendan Scanell) and anger-management cell-phone store operator Angry Mike (Asif Ali) — stage something like an intervention.
Their “hangover” romp never romps, even though it takes them to a Texas “Redneck Festival,” where Darlene the Ferret Trainer (Taryn Manning) might be the sure thing Sid needs to get out of his funk.
The almost-laughs are sprinkled all over this dog like dandruff — Jonesie noting the generally aged folks who join Sid’s misnamed lost-a-lover grief support group.
“What in the mothballs and All-Bran is going on here?”
A good way for bros to kick back and relax? Drinks in a kiddie ball pit.
“Pedos! Pedos!” the merry but “triggered” children shout.
Runway Dave’s eyes bug out at the portly, hairy men who populate any given redneck revel.
“I’ve died and gone to ‘bear’ heaven!”
Snoop shows up and we almost get a laugh. But that’s far too little and entirely too late to give “Bromates” a chance.
Rating: R for crude and sexual content, language throughout and some drug use.
Cast: Lil Rel Howery, Josh Brener, Brendan Scanell, Asif Ali, Taryn Manning, Jessica Lowe, Rob Riggle, Marla Gibbs and Snoop Dogg as himself.
Credits: Directed by Court Crandall, scripted by Chris Kemper and Court Crandall. A Quiver release.
In terms of the creative process, warts and all, it’d be more authoritative if Disney hadn’t produced its own origin cartoon character story.
But Nov 18, Disney+ serves it up.
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Documentary Preview: Disney makes a film about the Mouse that Made Them — “Mickey: The Story of a Mouse”
Perhaps the pithiest way to describe the new serio-comic “Amsterdam” is “a hot mess.”
Star-studded and stuffed with situations, characters and relationships, it starts with a breathless sprint as it introduces character upon character, scenes and settings on top of settings and real life conspiracies woven into fictional ones. And then the breaths turn rasping and gasping as an added onslaught of words and data are unleashed, a voice-over narration layered on top of everything we’re being exposed to, basically all once.
“‘Amsterdam’…it was there all along.”
It’s all bloody exhausting, and pretty much from the start.
David O. Russell’s historical mystery folds a couple of Oscar winners, a handful of the most beautiful and talented women in cinema and American pop culture and a lot of “This really happened” events into a Big Conspiracy yarn set in the world’s first serious flirtation with fascism, the 1930s, when one World War was just enough of a memory that a lot of people who should’ve known better steered us right into another.
And in America, lightly-bloodied but triumphant, veterans including our three heroes contemplate the pathology of those who returned from Europe but “followed the wrong god home.”
Christian Bale is a doctor who lost his eye as a combat medic with the American Expeditionary Force in the Argonne. He served with an African American corps which included a lawyer (John David Washington) and the lawyer’s trusted and more streetwise friend (Chris Rock).
And when Dr. Berendsen and Harold Woodman, Esq. are mangled like thousands of others in the horrific combat of the war’s final year, a French nurse (Margot Robbie) was the one who removed and collected all the bullets and shrapnel from their bodies, befriended the married doc and became the lover of the lawyer as she turned out to be an American socialite named Valerie, and an aspiring avant garde artist intent on turning the spent metal of the World War into tea sets and such.
The three “made a pact” that they would “look out for each other.” The doctor and the lawyer bring this bond home with them, where Doc experiments with pain killers and other unsanctioned ways to help his fellow veterans, the Harold helps them legally and together they run a veterans charity.
Valerie vanishes. Until, that is, the combat comrades find themselves mixed-up in the mysterious death of their racially and morally enlightened commanding officer (Ed Begley Jr.) and his daughter’s (Taylor Swift) fateful effort to find out who or what conspiratorial entity may have played a hand in it.
“Amsterdam” begins with promise and really hits its stride with an exciting finale built around another World War veteran, a celebrated Marine general played by Robert DeNiro.
But man, do this film’s middle acts wear a body out. Timothy Olyphant plays a fanatical hit-man. There’s a grisly autopsy carried out by a nurse (Zoe Saldana) who has to pass herself off as “Portuguese” for the racist medical establishment to let her do what she does best, a couple of bird watching “businessmen” (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers) who are actually spies who may “call on” our heroic trio at some point, in need of assistance, and the imperious and faintly-sinister relatives of rich girl Valerie (Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy).
As comic as it often tries to be, “Amsterdam” treats us to a bit of 1930s eugenics, and German immigrants (German American Bund) and native born Americans with anti-democratic tendencies.
The cast is almost uniformly impressive, though even they can’t conceal the fact that many scenes and shots seem superfluous to the larger story and not enough of the jokes land.
Washington holds his own with Bale, Robbie and the exquisite comic timing of Chris Rock and Myers.
And one can’t let the presence of Robbie, Saldana, Taylor-Joy and Swift pass unnoticed, as the care with which they’re made up, lit and photographed is a study in how to film gorgeous movie stars — and a singer-songwriter who isn’t much of an actress. Olivia Wilde should call the DP.
The equally-stunning Andrea Riseborough plays the manipulative Anti-Semitic upper class wife that the badly-disfigured doctor tries to come home to. Riseborough steals the movie with just a few scenes and brilliantly-considered gestures, a woman whose family will never “accept” her husband and who has the aura of a wife who’s OK with that and life without the now-damaged spouse she and her imperious father talked into going into combat.
Russell gives Robbie’s Valerie the line about history’s dark passages being a “recurring dream” that the world wakes up to every few decades. That’s the point that he’s getting at here, that we’re teetering on a new dark age with fascists on the rise in Italy, Hungary, Russia, France, Britain, China and America and conspiring to end the Age of Liberal Democracy.
It’s happened before, and it took a “Greatest Generation” to resist it. Now, all it takes is the right media demagogue and the masses are ready to “follow the wrong god home” and right off a cliff.
The racism, white supremacy and amoral, stateless superrich determined to be the only “ruling class” is nothing new, Russell shows us. And neither are the oases which remind people of the possibilities of equality, justice, freedom and free expression. There’s always an “Amsterdam” where we can see the light.
Great message, and damned hopeful. Pity it’s buried in a movie that talks too much, encompasses more than it should and muddies its moral in a convoluted tale with just a smidgen of action and dering do and lots of jokes mixed-in with the forebodings of what happened once happening again.
Russell squandered an “important” story and his access to the best talent and a healthy budget and made something a lot closer to “Joy” and “I Heart Huckabees” than “Three Kings,” or “American Hustle.” He was following “the right god.” He just lost his way more often than not.
Rating: R for brief violence and bloody images.
Cast: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Shannon, Alessandro Nivola, Rami Malek, Mike Myers, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Taylor Swift and Robert De Niro.
Credits: Scripted and directed by David O. Russell. A 20th Century release.
Movie Nation 