Movies about the early career of stage and screen “wunderkind” Orson Welles are, by definition, for fans. And one thing fans are always going to insist on is casting a convincing version of the charismatic, sonorous stage and radio tyro of the ’30s and ’40s who became a film legend of the ’40s-70s, Orson Welles.
You don’t make a “Night That Panicked America” without a Paul Shenar, a “Mank” without Tom Burke or roll cameras on “R.K.O. 281” without someone of Liev Schreiber’s stature, voice and caliber. “Cradle Will Rock” won’t rock without an Angus MacFadyen as Welles, and if you’re really lucky, you land The Gold Standard, Christian McKay if you’re making a movie titled “Me & Orson Welles.”
The only excuse for not getting a properly magnetic Welles would be if you’re making a “student film.” Even the best of those don’t attract top drawer talent, and they generally aren’t released, with cause.
“Voodoo MacBeth” is a USC student film version of the theatre event that gave the “wunderkind” his “boy wonder” nickname. It’s an ambitious account of how Welles was handed his big break, a chance to direct a Federally-backed make-work-for-actors during the Depression production of Shakespeare’s “Scottish Tragedy.” Working with an all Black cast — because The New Deal recognized that Black actors need to work, too — Welles turned “Macbeth” into a Haitian voodoo fantasy set in the early earl 19th century.
The film never comes close to catching the lightning in a bottle this famed production became. It rubs much of the edge off many characters (especially Welles), lacks spark or anything resembling a sense of occasion, and is — at least — historically defensible even as it takes many liberties with the “real” events.
Ten student directors and eight student screenwriters and a cast of mostly little-known players take their best shot at this touchstone event in 1930s theater and in the career of Welles. They fall well short of the mark. Yes, this “Voodoo” film won awards at mostly lesser known film festivals, so the idea of releasing it theatrically isn’t insane. But it does border on delusional.
“Voodoo Macbeth” recreates, on the cheap, the New York of the mid-1930s, when the Federal Theatre Project was set up to employ starving Depression Era actors. New York Negro Theater Unit head, actress and producer Rose McClendon (Inger Tudor) was talked by fellow producer and future Oscar-winning actor John Houseman (Daniel Kuhlman) into getting stage and radio actor and sometime director Welles (Jewell Wilson Bridge) to take on McClendon’s dream, a chance for her to play Lady Macbeth.
In the Jim Crow 1930s, it took a Great Depression for this “crazy” idea to even get considered.
Welles and McClendon are at loggerheads as he struggles to cast this show with the biggest names in the Black theater of the day, few in number, and a lot of unknowns. Welles was a childish, headstrong newlywed of 20 (June Schreiner plays Virginia Welles, who is credited here with thinking up turning the witches into “voodoo” mystics, with jungle drums in the score, etc.). Unused to dealing with Black actors and Black people outside of servile jobs, Welles cast a singer with no acting experience here, a boxer (Wrekless Watson) with “presence” there, a drunk (Gary McDonald plays Jack Carter), the would-be thespian elevator operator (Jeremy Tardy) at his apartment building, and a leading man with immigration problems (Ephraim López is Juano Hernandez).
The superstitious Welles becomes convinced the show is cursed thanks to the play that they’re doing, with accidents, bad luck and the like, with their chief obstacle to success a showboating conservative Texas Congressman (Hunter Bodine) hellbent on shutting them down.
But they soldier on — Welles directing — “Say the words Shakespeare gave you…and MEAN them” — and the cast overcoming the odds as the Black community pickets (Welles dons blackface to fill in for a missing player), Federal money is withheld and an early critic, painted as corrupt here (Ben Shields) savages the show.
None of it, not Welles’ flirtation with his Lady Macduff later Lady Macbeth (Ashli Haynes), not Welles’ domestic problems, not the cast’s various burdens and foibles, is scripted or acted in ways as compelling as the real story, which has been related, in great detail, by every Welles biographer.
Student filmmakers are allowed to overreach, to make mistakes in tone, tight pacing and clear messaging. It’s a learning experience, even in a written-and-directed-by LARGE committees project like this. The only thing releasing this middling effort accomplishes is keeping the Welles lore it’s based on alive, even as it discourages others from taking a shot at filming this.
But if it’s any consolation, remember another touchstone theatrical event from Welles’ electric years in the New York theater. “Cradle Will Rock,” the leftist labor musical he staged with Houseman and composer Marc Blitzstein, also made for a disappointing movie, even if it had a pretty good Orson as one of the leads.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Inger Tudor, Jewell Wilson Bridges, Jeremy Tardy, Wrekless Watson, Ashli Haynes, June Schreiner, Daniel Kuhlman, Hunter Bodine and Gary McDonald
Credits: Directed by Dagmawi Abebe , Rohy ARwas, Hannah Bang, Christopher Beaton, Agazi Desta, Tiffany Kontoyiannis Guillen, Zoe Salnave, Ernesto Sandoval and Sabina Vajraca, scripted by Agazi Desta, Jennifer Frazin, Morgan Milender, Molly Miller, Amri Rigby, Joel David Santner, Erica Sutherlin and Chris Tarricone. A Lighthouse release.
The leather gives them away — the tattoos, the piercings, the black boots and wristlets and matching Flying Vee replica guitars.
This here is a metal band, and judging from the “Enter Sandman” era hair, they’re all about the thrash.
Slaves to Sirens plays it fast and hits those chords hard behind the vocal-cords-shredding yowl/growl of its lead singer.
You can hear a version of this quintet in any metal club on any given weekend. But the novel thing about these Sirens is that they’re all women. And they’re trying to break-out from one of the least likely heavy metal hotspots on Earth — conservative, strife-riven Beirut, Lebanon.
“Sirens” is an engaging behind-the-scenes doc about this band, which formed in 2015 and got good enough/fast enough that they were abruptly summoned to make their Glastonbury festival debut a couple of years back.
Rita Baghdadi’s intimate, fly-on-the-wall documentary captures the tightrope walk artists have to walk in a place where “conservative” could mean “intolerant” and violently so, where women are more emancipated than say, Syria or Jordan, but where “we’re living in a cycle of fear” just for donning the leather and cranking it up in a divided place with such a troubled history.
“War, instability and unemployment” is all anyone there’s known “since my grandparents’ time,” lead guitarist Lilas Mayassi complains. Her mother mutters “It will always be like this,” (in English and Arabic with English subtitles) and we believe it.
Rhythm guitarist Shery Bechara’s father and mother are just as supportive, and equally fatalistic.
“My parents always tell me ‘There is no future here.'”
And yet she and Lilas and the Sirens persist.
Director Baghdadi zeroes in on the guitarists, their inspire-each-other co-dependent relationship and the band’s first heady taste of fame — a Revolver Magazine write-up and an abrupt invitation to be flown to Britain to play at Glastonbury.
The story ebbs and flows like the relationship between these two founding members, one of whom was just now acting on same sex sexual attraction in a part of the world where that can have deadly consequences.
The strife in the band is something of a cliche, even if the shouting matches and fractious band meetings are all too real. It’s ongoing, as two members quit this past summer. The film’s dating sequence has a long coaching-a-new-love-about-how-to-meet-her-mother on a drive to the house, with a dash-cam, that can’t help but seem contrived if not staged.
But as the band cusses each other out, busts up and reunites, as older musician/mentors and relatives talk about how much easier life would be if they’d just play pop, as Beirut experiences yet another tragedy (the infamous fireworks factory explosion) that calls for regime change, and a benefit concert, we come to appreciate how it’s still about the music, man.
And if you’re asked to kiss and make up and join an orchestra and more experienced musicians for a Beirut performance of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” you tune up, don the fishnets and halter tops and get it done.
That’s pretty damned metal, I have to say.
Cast: Shery Bechara, Lilas Mayassi, Maya Khaiallah, Alma Doumani and Tatyana Boughaba
Credits: Scripted and directed by Rita Baghdadi. An Oscilloscope Labs release.
Running time: 1:20
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“Project Wolf Hunting” is “Con Air” on a cargo ship — psychopathic convicts being transported by sea. And there’s something even more monstrous on ice in the hold!
Boy, Hollywood’s going to have to put the work in to catch up with where Korean action cinema is these days.
Writer-director Kim Hongsun’s action epic is a “Captain Phillips” bloodbath, a straight-up splatter pic — that’s a slasher film that doesn’t know when enough is enough. Scene after scene is filled with convicts killing crew and cops, or cops killing convicts, or everybody being killed by Korea’s take on Mary Shelley’s most famous work.
It’s a wonder anybody can kill anybody, as the decks are so bathed in blood it’s hard to avoid those nasty slip-and-fall accidents while you’re lunging with a knife, swinging a sledgehammer or merely taking aim with an assault rifle.
Writer-director Kim Hongsun (“Traffickers”) just signed with a Hollywood agency, which will at least coordinate the proper spelling of his name so that IMDb doesn’t have a different “Kim” credited as screenwriter. He stages machine gun shoot-outs within the confines of the bridge, knife fights on every deck and a brawl in the engine room, where fuel oil and fuel oil lines lead the Filipino engineer to bellow, “You can’t shoot here! The ship will stop!”
TOOL fight!
The set-up — there was this agreement between Korea and the Philippines a few years back, an exchange of prison inmates, with Filipinos sent home to do their time on the islands and Korean criminals likewise sent “home.” A prologue shows how things can go wrong when you put hated criminals on a jet and have to walk them through an airport.
So the decision is made to rent space on the Frontier Titan, a cargo ship. Twenty “veteran detectives” and their chief (Dong-il Sung) will watch over the worst who got caught doing their worst in the Philippines, including a necrophiliac and assorted murderers, with Jong-du (Seo In-guk) the worst of the very worst, and a “celebrity” “red notice” killer (Jang Dong-yoon) in their ranks as well.
But we smell a rat the moment we see the shifty-eyed “doctor” hired at the last minute to join this three day sail. And there are other sketchy characters on board, along with openly abusive cops.Then there’s the amoral corporate creep (Jang Dong-yoon) and his crew that takes over the shipping company’s traffic-monitoring station back in Inchon.
Things are bound to go awfully, gruesomely wrong. And they do. A viewing tip? Don’t get too invested in any one character, or group of characters.
“If this isn’t hell,” the doctor grumbles in Korean with English subtitles, “I don’t know what is!”
The script works in Korea’s favorite nemesis, Japan, in some World War II flashbacks that don’t fold into the story seamlessly. Scenes don’t play by their own rules. That “Don’t shoot in here” warning falls on deaf ears, as there’s no warning psychopaths not to do something.
“Project Wolf Hunting” is a brutally efficient killing machine long before the supernatural twist stomps into the proceedings. That almost seems like a gimmick-too-far.
Only a couple of characters merit background sketches, and these explain and motivate their characters when the picture doesn’t really require that. A few red herrings offer clever distractions. But how many “villains” can one thriller stand?
Kim keeps the action going and the blood flowing through two hours of grisly, grim mayhem as the armed and murderous go at it in a “prison” from which there is no escape, only a chance to be chum for the sharks.
Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale, Mia Farrow, Christopher MacDonald, Jennifer Coolidge and Margo Martindale are among the stars of this “true story” of terrorized suburbia.
Whatever audience awareness tracking and pre-release ticket sales say about how a film will perform at the box office, the defining clue is that moment the rubber meets the road — opening night, still called “previews” by the studios.
“The Woman King” had a $3.1 million opening Thursday, and opened just over $19 million.
“Don’t Worry Darling,” with all the buzz — much of it bad — had high awareness and a special early EARLY preview of IMAX showings in the larger cities. And it opened not Thursday night but late Thursday afternoon.
It’s “preview” take was still $3.1 million. All those predictions of curious filmgoers checking the film out, of Harry Styles fans following into his dotage and swarming the cineplexes were an illusion.
“Don’t Worry Darling” opened below the lower end of its expectations, which were $20-21 million.
It opened at $3.1 million, just like “The Woman King,” and the weekend estimate take now it $19.2 million, almost just like “The Woman King.”
Thanks #boxofficepro for confirming what seemed obvious Friday morning.
“The Woman King” had a slightly better second weekend than predicted, BTW.
Movie Nation 