Kids movies have to pass what I call “The Jerry Orbach Test.”
Back when the animated “Beauty and the Beast” came out, I interviewed Orbach and he told me what persuaded him to take on the role of Lumiere. He and his wife went to a revival showing of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
He was to voice Lumiere in “Beast” before “The Little Mermaid” came out and revived Disney’s animated brand. And Orbach, a stage song and dance man turned tough guy character actor wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his new brand singing in a cartoon.
He talked about the kid-crowded theater and the chaos that entailed for watching a then 50 year old animated classic. “And then, the movie started and it was dead quiet. They were rapt in awe. I thought, ‘Anything that gets kids to pay that close attention is worth doing. It’s going to last.”
Ever since, I’ve watched to see how much children act out and seem distracted by kids films. The good ones sit them down and shut them up, except when it’s time to laugh.
“Lyle” looks jaunty and juvenile. I’m totally down for that. It opens this coming weekend.
Well shoot. I was all set to catch a Sunday matinee of “Smile,” as Hurricane Ian washed away my Wed. preview of it last week. I get to my closest AMC, an older cinema (AMC Classic). And they’re closed. The power is on and every store around them is open.
I wonder if this is one of those theaters AMC will sneakily bail on its lease and close. This is the way movie theaters disappeared @2000-2001 by the hundreds. Was the hurricane a mere coincidence, convenient moment to pull the plug?
We’ll see. Meanwhile, 20th Century’s Disney-owned reboot of “Hellraiser” beckons. I’m on…pins and needles over this one. Streams later this week.
“Red River Road” is a dramatically-flat paranoid thriller about an isolated family unsure about the reality of the pandemic that put them there.
Sources of paranoia? Start with an enforced lack of information, a “box” that brings them food, a ban on cell phones and Internet usage, which is blamed for the contagion, and an assault on memory that could be described as “gaslighting” in a more sinister light.
The Cape Cod filmmaking family of writer-director and star Paul Schuyler made this, a reasonably polished (the odd “off mike” moment) but dully-scripted affair that taps into conspiracy theories that date back decades. No, not “contrails” and “vaccines” and the like, but that ’80s “The Government is planning to ENSLAVE us with barcodes” mania. “They’ve even got them on the HIGHWAY signs!”
And “chips,” or course. No meal for the paranoid in America is complete without implanted “chips.”
Stephen and Anna (Paul and Jade Schuyler) and their sons Wyatt and Shawn (Quinn Schuyler and Shaw Schuyler) fled Boston for “the summer house” some while back to escape a plague.
“The less people the better,” Stephen declares. “It’s safer here.”
Anna laments that they have “no life to go back to…’Someday’ has no meaning for me” any more.
Whatever this contagion is, it bends people’s perception of reality. Just like social media? And it’s killed people they knew. Just like…
But as we yawn through the banalities of their daily existence, we see how this isolation works, and works on them.
They get a tense, scheduled phone call which requires that they answer it with ID numbers and order necessities in the most curt fashion possible. A green barcoded plastic bin arrives when they’re sleeping with old movies (“The Ninth Configuration,” the John Carpenter version of “The Thing”) and food.
There are finite limits to their world — cell phones, etc., banned, sharply-defined borders to how far beyond the edge of their yard they can go. And as they follow the rules, their memories start to work on on. Some of them start to wonder what is real, and what all this obedience is gaining them.
The acting is drab, save for the inevitable third act meltdown when the picture pokes around for a resolution. The shot selection, overly-urgent score and editing hypes this bland affair into something it decidedly is not — exciting.
Whatever the messaging, it’s just not very interesting or compelling. “Red River Road” is more a movie that putters along, not really going anywhere, not taking any time to create suspense until very late in the game, not conjuring up a mystery most would care to solve before the characters do.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Paul Schuyler, Jade Schuyler, Quinn Schuyler, Shaw Schuyler and Art Devine.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Schuyler. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Looks and sounds credulous. It’s from James Fox, so if you’re looking for Occam’s Razor, don’t hold your breath.
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If “satire,” as playwright George S. Kaufman famously opined, “is what closes Saturday night,” where does “surrealism” sit on your average film consumer’s palate?
Writer-director J. Rick Castaneda’s oddball career of web series (“Coma, Period,” which helped launch Rob Delaney) and TV shows like “The Sushi Dragon Show starring TheSushiDragon” and “The Sushi Dragon After Party Hosted by TheSushiDragon” that presumably someone out there is watching doesn’t really answer that question with his first feature film, “All Sorts.”
“Sorts” is surreal, bizarre, satiric and plucky — a crowd-funded indie farce that became a make work project for greater Yakima, Washington, apparently. It’s willfully weird, in your face and slapdash, flinging a lot of curiosities and would-be jokes, punch-lines and eccentric characters at the screen in pursuit of laughs. And it doesn’t quite coalesce into anything that would make it past opening night in terms of audience appeal, or anything a viewer can really sink one’s teeth into.
Imagine “The Office” remade as a no-budget feature by Terry Gilliam during his “Brazil” phase. There’s some seriously silly and offbeat world-building going on, here. But to what end?
Diego (Eli Vargas) lives in his car, heating his coffee and making his toast with a (presumably) 12volt iron as a hotplate, even keeping a plastic bin in the backseat to use as a tub. He applies for a job through the classifieds. And as oddly as the interview goes with the dizzy Mr. Vasquez (Luis Daveze), when he learns that Diego can type “55 words a MINUTE” that closes the deal.
Diego has the job, his own cubicle and his own uninspiring “inspirational” thought-a-day calendar.
“Nov. 4…Wednesday is for Losers.”
But there’s no computer at his desk. As the company he’s joined is called “Data Mart,” that’s going to be a problem. He gets assignments he can’t finish, not that anyone other than Vasquez seems to care. And the person he’s replacing has “disappeared.” People disappear from the windowless cubicle forest of Data Mart, devoured by filing cabinets, something we see and yet never see explained.
Diego’s co-workers respond to him with dismissal, disdain and — for the most part — silence. That might be due to the fact that almost everybody is an incorrigible goof-off, which could be because a lot of them don’t seem to know what the hell it is they’re supposed to be doing or what’s really going on.
Data Mart works with outdated computers and mountains of paper files. Diego’s “supervisor” snaps “I’m not your friend, I’m not your supervisor.” Inanimate objects like paper clips crawl off as if they have a mind of their own.
And Mr. Vasquez is so clueless that he has CCTV installed to spy on his lazy workforce, and when he spies video of himself staring at the screen, looking for employees who aren’t working, he fires himself and the tech guy who is looking at the monitor with him, checking to see if the cameras are working.
That sort of deadpan take on office life is taken to the next level when Diego is tipped that the way to get a computer is to leave 20 Paydays inside a ventilation vent. He comes to learn that a fellow who claimed to have been “transferred” is living in the bowels of the building, doing other people’s work, stealing office supplies and computers and ransoming them for Payday candy bars out of the vending machine.
And then there’s the manic filing cabinet pixie, June Yuh (Greena Park). She keeps an octopus cartoon in her cubicle as inspiration and nickname. June’s a filing fool. When Diego sees a flier for an underground filing competition, he simply has to drag June into the “Office Space” underworld to do battle in WWE-styled file-offs.
“He’s STYLIN’, profilin’ and CATEGORIZING” our ring announcer/color commentator for the “Filing League” bellows as a cacophony of collating goes on in bouts that cubicle drones from all over cheer on and wager over.
June could dominate this world, but she needs Diego as her manager, and maybe more than just her “manager.”
The world-building here is absurdist in the extreme, with all sorts of promising story threads tossed out there and either left under-developed or abandoned altogether.
Some of the characters register, but none of them really connect.
As cute as the office of oddballs might be, as semi-inventive as their many strategies for fooling the boss into thinking they’re working (one guy keeps a cardboard cut-out of himself ready for when he takes off for endless breaks), with an elaborate string-with-jingle-bells system for signaling each other that Vasquez is making his “How hard are they working?” rounds, the cute and quirky “All Sorts” runs up against a wall it can’t punch through.
Surreal it most certainly is. It’s just not all that funny. The reaction writer-director Castaneda reaches for and achieves, time and again, is “Well, that’s cute/interesting/weird/downright daft.” But all this eccentricity, all this world-building and all these sight gags never manages more than a chuckle.
Rating: unrated, a little slapstick, no profanity
Cast: Eli Vargas, Greena Park, Luis Daveze and Mike Markoff
Credits: Scripted and directed by J. Rick Castaneda. A Vibrant Penguin release.
The box office is settling back into its time-proven pre-pandemic pattern of “If it’s horror, it opens at $18-20 million” with “Smile,” a nicely-hyped thriller built on the infectious “Smile” of its victims/perpetrators.
After a slow Thursday, a decent Friday is pushing this one to a $22 million opening weekend, according to Deadline.com.
That’s enough to win most weekends these days, with last weekend’s “Don’t Worry, Darling” slumping over 60% to $7.5 million on its second weekend out. It will have cleared $33 all-in, by midnight Sunday. Not a bomb, but not likely to have legs or clear $50 million when all is said and done.
“The Woman King,” on the other hand, may stick around longer as it adds another $6.2 million and will clear the $50 million mark by next week.
Billy Eichner’s first big screen kiss, “Bros,” is a wide-release bust. A $4.75 million opening for a heavily-hyped, generally funny but somewhat unromantic rom-com isn’t great. Back to “Billy on the Street” it is.
An Indian epic, “Ponniyan Selvan:Part One” managed $2.1 million in fairly wide release.
“Bullet Train” clears the $100 million mark thanks to another $1.3, and “D.C.’s League of Super Pets” is closing in on $100 million — shockingly clearing the $91 million mark. “Top Gun: Maverick” and the “Avatar” re-release killed any chance the Roadside Attractions Sigourney Weaver/Kevin Kline dramedy “The Good House” from opening in the top ten. That too, bombed (under $700K).
Walter Hill has been one of the modern cinema’s true masters of the Western film. He directed “The Long Riders,” “Geronimo,” and “Wild Bill,” and he directed the pilot of the TV series “Wild Bill” helped inspire, “Deadwood,” as well as a Western mini series of some repute — “Broken Trail.”
But “Dead for a Dollar,” which is almost certain to be his farewell to the genre, makes for a desultory curtain call.
The script is a nonsensical Western variation of the “kidnapped wife not really kidnapped” trope. The dialogue has its hard-bitten moments, but they’re few and far between. The texture is tidy rather than dusty and saddle sore, a Western with precious little grit as everyone and everything is freshly-scrubbed and coiffed, even the horses.
Did Martha Stewart do the production design? Not “a good thing.”
Hill built the film around the most colorless performance in Austrian showboat Christoph Waltz’s screen career, miscast Rachel Brosnahan as the “kidnapped” wife and Hamish Linklater as her jealous, jilted husband.
And Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt aren’t good enough to rescue it.
Waltz plays “Mister Borlund,” a bounty hunter who always gets his man, always takes him by surprise and usually blows holes in him when he does.
“Just another fella dead for a dollar,” is the way one bad hombre (Dafoe) he brought in alive describes Borlund’s other victims. Joe Cribbens is about to finish his prison sentence when he gets a Borlund visit. Borlund warns him in a way that lets us know Cribbens won’t be taking the advice. These two “have a reckoning” coming.
Meanwhile, there’s this rich and powerful man (Linklater) in New Mexico Territory (1897) whose wife has run for the border with her latest lover, an Army deserter who happens to be Black (Brandon Scott). Borlund is hired to go south and fetch her from Mexico, with a Cavalry Buffalo Soldier (Warren Burke) assigned to guide him.
Standing in their way is the armed oligarch ranch owner who runs things in his corner of Chihuahua, Tiberio Vargas (Bratt).
A lot of the characters have a lot to say in this against-the-Eastwood-grain horse opera. Everybody talks and talks and talks.
“I guess you wanna know my story, too,” Corporal Pope (Burke) offers, a trooper inclined to overshare pretty much every time he appears on screen. He’s about to face a hired gun with a thing for bullwhips and feels the need to list his credits.
“First five years in the Army, they had me working as a TEAMSTER.” As if his foe, or we, need to be told how someone got good with a bullwhip. Pages of unnecessary dialogue clutter the screenplay.
Brosnahan’s Rachel Kidd tries to reason with her “rescuer,” wondering if the real crime is that she’s “run off with a man of color.”
Perhaps the real crime is fleeing, pretending to be kidnapped and demanding ransom of her husband. And she’s about 110 years ahead of the curve in using the phrase “man of color.” At least “uppity” is deployed in a Jim Crow-correct sense, although all these violent lowlifes seem to have had their speech scrubbed of the racial slurs so common in the 19th century, and lose some of their menace because of it.
There’s a testy poker game with a British popinjay nicknamed English Bill (Guy Burnet) that gives Dafoe one good line, and little else.
“If I was you, I’d get outta my sight before I run through all my good humor.“
Everyone involved can be excused for jumping at the chance to make a Western for one of the masters of the genre. But the performances, almost to a one, seem shellshocked at how little money was being spent to make it look, sound and feel right.
Brosnahan in particular seems to take Waltz’s “colorless” turn as the tone she chooses to strike.
A vintage Hill bit with a horse coming through glass doors and a couple of decent exchanges in an overall perfunctory big shootout finale arrive just in time to remind of us how great this filmmaker once was, and how sad it is that he has to hang up his spurs with “Dead for a Dollar.”
Rating: R for violence, some sexual content/graphic nudity and language.
Cast: Christoph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan, Warren Burke, Luis Chávez, Brandon Scott, Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt
Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Matt Harris and Water Hill. A Quiver release.
Twenty four characters’ stories telling of life going on during lockdown, this stars Sandra Oh, Mary-Louis Parker, Elaine May, Moses Ingram, Raul Castillo, Don Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt and others.
Another “Zoom” reliant shutdown movie, but this one scripted and directed by the chap who gave us “Pieces of April” and the novel “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”
Movie Nation 