You’d think there’d be a historical marker noting this town’s places in cinema history — Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and the Coen Brothers filming a movie in the boonies, Food City manager Mike Campbell co-founding a cinema empire out of a closed movie theater.
Maybe Raimi should donate “the car” to get the ball rolling. Have Bruce show up for a ribbon cutting over the ’73 Olds Delta ’88.
“Root Letter” is an indie murder mystery about a missing pen pal, a film based on a Japanese video game.
It’s a slow, sloppily-structured exercise in tedium that is simple yet hard to follow, short but interminable thanks to leaden pacing and often-mumbled dialogue by its cast of mostly-unknowns.
Nah. Not beating around the bush on this one.
An opening scene introduces us to a teen we see getting a beat down thanks to an enraged father catching young Carlos (Danny Ramirez) having sex with his daughter.
That puts Carlos in a Tulsa hospital. And that’s where pen pal notes from Sarah (Keana Marie) are forwarded. It seems his class in Tulsa and her class in Baton Rouge have been assigned randomly-selected pen pals to correspond with as writing exercises.
As they’re both well into high school, this seems oddly late for them to be getting such elementary writing instruction. Usually this sort of assignment rolls out for pre-hormonal fifth graders.
They share the banalities of life — sanitized daily routine, childhood memories. She’s into Billie Eilish and Lorde, he’s all about Slayer and Metallica.
He’s just now figuring out “you can’t save everyone,” he writes. “Dear Carlos, I killed him,” she responds.
When Carlos recovers from his injuries and settles back into work washing dishes, the letters stop. That’s when he decides to travel to Louisiana and figure out what happened.
As as bland as this picture has been — sharing little snippets of his life, cutting to show bigger slices of hers — it’s about to get a lot worse.
Director Sonja O’Hara and screenwriter David Ebeltoft never get a handle on how to handle parallel structure in a screenplay. We lose track of Danny in the fictive “present” for most of the movie, and what few scenes there are utterly blow the mystery of how a teen would figure out another teen’s last name and track her down. Google isn’t the answer.
Danny spreads her letters on his bed as if to hunt for clues, but nah. Let’s just go find her English teacher and get her to figure out a way to let him know without violating her school system’s ethics and without making punching-bag Danny — he gets pummeled a few times — break a sweat doing his own homework.
Sarah’s mother (Lydia Hearst) seems a wreck, and Sarah’s whole life with her is an “Is he gone?” work-around with Mom’s rotating collection of boyfriends and what turn out to be her addictions and probation problems.
Sarah’s friends aren’t much of an escape either. BFF Zoe (Kate Edmonds) has hooked up with Mr. Wrong. And Jackson (Sam A Coleman) is interested in getting into the drug trade, using their stammering, supposedly meek mutual friend Caleb (Breon Pugh) to steal drugs from Caleb’s over-armed, camo-loving drug-dealing uncle (Mark St. Cyr).
Another friend slept with Sarah’s now-ex boyfriend. So Sarah gets drunk at a party, and the film is so sloppy we can’t tell if it’s from imbibing or it she was roofied. Next thing she knows, she’s awakened in a nice house down the street where the kind couple (Terry J. Nelson, Dodie Brown) took her in and let her sleep it off.
Turns out, they lost a daughter about her age. It made the wife a little crazy and left them both shattered. Could they be Sarah’s lifeline?
All this back story isn’t presented as something Carlos is figuring out, reading up on or being told by the good folks of Baton Rouge. Because remember, the script has forgotten about him. Until, that is, he starts poking around wherever Sarah might have been and asking questions about what became of her.
Hand to heart here, very little of this makes any sense. Whatever happened to Sarah would have generated a police report and journalism Carlos could access. Whatever he’s getting off TV station websites doesn’t explain in the least where she is — above or below ground.
Sarah’s an interesting character, and those she finds herself throwing in with are at least colorfully bad. The high school milieu has some limited interest. But Carlos is dully written and sleepily played.
I watch movies for a living, and as thrillers go, I found this laughably inept at just getting the basics of storytelling down. You need to understand who and how people are, follow a narrative throughline of some sort and give us something to hang onto so that we’re in the same boat as the protagonist trying to piece this “mystery” together.
The parallel structure problems, a third act string of crimes without consequences or even remorse and the idiotic steps Carlos takes in tracking somebody he’s never met with only a few PG letters to go on overwhelm this movie and don’t exactly embellish the image of the game it’s based on, either.
Honestly, I feel I know less about what connects these two and why any of this is worth exploring than I did when “Root Letter” started. I know I care a lot less.
Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, profanity
Cast: Keana Marie, Danny Ramirez, Lydia Hearst, Mark St. Cyr, Sam A. Coleman, Breon Pugh, Kate Edmonds, Terry J. Nelson, Dodie Brown
Credits: Directed by Sonja O’Hara, scripted by David Ebeltoft, based on the Kadakowa Games video game. An Entertainment Squad release.
Running time: 1:26
Whatever the stylistic charms of Olivier Bourdeaut’s acclaimed novel, the film version of “Waiting for Bojangles (En attendant Bojangles)” offers further proof that “manic pixie dream girls” exist in France, and not just in the person of Audrey “Amelie” Tautou.
It’s about a dizzy, star-kissed romance between two freer-than-free spirits and the child they give birth to and raise in the hippiest “free range” tradition. The novel tells this story through the eyes of the child, and in his voice. That’s not the way the film unfolds.
Director and co-writer Régis Roinsard invites us into a fantasy world of carefree love, lying as performance art and “unbridled imagination” — all made possible because of (one guesses) family money. Nobody works in this fictional bubble, and yet endless parties, extravagant living quarters and mountains of bills can pile up because no one can or should be bothered to pay them.
It’s a world with no visible means of support, a world where a couple can “meet cute” and discover “our song” on his baby blue 1958 MGA car radio motoring their way to a madcap “marriage on impulse” at an empty roadside chapel.
Because that’s how free spirited “Name me as you wish” Camille (or “Antoinette,” “Rita,” etc) and the rakish rogue George (Romain Duris) roll.
The fact that “our song,” which we hear over and over again in the film, is “Mister Bojangles” and Jerry Jeff Walker wouldn’t get around to composing it until ten years after that 1958 opening is immaterial. We’re on the fringes of magical realism and perhaps relying on a child’s misremembered memory. After all, young Gary (Solan Machado Graner) was only conceived that night. He wasn’t really a witness.
We meet Georges as he seems to be crashing this posh patio party overlooking the Mediterranean sunset, thanks to his stubble (a lower-class trait and another 1950s Riviera anachronism) and ever-evolving lies-as-conversation starters. He was Josephine Baker’s lover “during the war.” He is Romanian and “you might have heard” (in French with English subtitles) of his ancestor, “Count Dracula.”
He spies the stunning blonde across the way, dancing as if no one’s watching, and is warned away by his old money family friend (Grégory Gadebois). Camille (Virginie Efira) will “drive you doolally,” is the warning. “She dances on the edge of a precipice.”
It’s already too late. Smitten Georges floats into her dance, leads her into an extravagant tango and fills her ears with colorful lies. She lies a little, too, as she barely takes notice of her new dance partner until the mob descends on him after uncovering his fibs. She sticks up for him, and they’re off , with her standing up in the tiny sports car as her diaphanous Grace Kelly-in-“To Catch A Thief” dress (Chanel?) billows in the breeze.
It was meant to be.
Over the course of the film, we see Georges indulge her every whim and eccentricity as she indulges his — among them, giving birth to his baby. It’s only when their boy reaches the age of 10 or so that the problems surface. Nightly parties, which their son attends, making him miss school, keeping a stork for a pet, doing almost everything on a whim — is that a sane way to raise a child?
Any viewer watching this and taking in the impulses, the bubbly mania and stress-free kick-their-problems-down-the-road lifestyle of these two-now-three, is almost certain to remember the manic pixie dream girls you’ve known, real life versions of Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” Streisand in “What’s Up Doc?” or Zoey Deschanel in just about anything.
I’ve been blessed with knowing four, by my perhaps-generous definition of these intoxicating free spirits. And as “Bojangles” takes its sobering turn towards “serious,” I couldn’t help but recall that three of the four died young.
Camille purposefully taking a walk down the street in the nude can be indulged by Georges, who dashes out, strips and joins her. But as one dinner party guest suggests when Camille strips off her panties to make an angry point, “She’s lost her mind.”
“Is Mom sick” the boy wants to know? “No more or less than most people” isn’t the most honest answer.
Duris, a star since “The Beat My Heart Skipped” and a screen heartbreaker since “Heartbreaker,” is at his dashing, sweep-you-off-your-feet best here. Georges dances, charms and lies like his life depends on it, like his whole shtick is a lie. He positively swoons over Camille (we get it). Duris sizzles in a Spanish flamenco production number in the third act.
And Efira (“Benedetta,” “Sink or Swim”) so cranks up the energy and the sexual allure for this woman that her dazzling beauty and devil-may-care spirit make her irresistible to pretty much any straight man you can think of, who would throw caution to the wind just to bask in her presence.
“I never fell in love before,” he pleads, after chasing down the MGA she caused him to crash, and then stole the morning after their “wedding.” “Don’t deprive me of such a delight.”
That’s the spirit of “Waiting for Bojangles,” the first half of it, anyway. Even the most irresponsible excesses — allowing Gary to decide he won’t attend school…at 10 — seem reasonable as this couple-and-child skip by on a years-long contact high that they share with us.
The second half is dark and more “reality” based, and manages to be a drag and drag dramatically as well. Perhaps mimicking the novel’s point of view and structure (Dad’s diary entries and Gary’s memories of his folks) would have helped.
But if you know the song that underscores this romance, know the Jerry Jeff and Sammy Davis Jr. and Nina Simone versions of it, you get what the novelist and the filmmakers were going for here. Reality is melancholy. Imagination and memory are our escape from it.
Camille explains it best. “When reality is sad and banal, make up a fantastical story” and live in that.
Rating: unrated, nudity
Cast: Romain Duris, Virginie Efira, Grégory Gadebois and Solan Machado Graner
Credits: Directed by Régis Roinsard, scripted by Romain Compingt and Régis Roinsard, based on a novel by Olivier Bourdeaut. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 2:04
Three friends struggle with a past that could cripple their future in this film, written directed by and starring Ty Gordon.
If you’ve never heard of Gordon, or seen “Harm” or “Obscura,” you’re not alone.
Sept. 30 this Film Arcade release comes our way.
“Burial” is a clunky but somewhat engrossing WWII “quest” thriller about Adolf Hitler’s body.
British B-movie writer-director Ben Parker (“The Chamber”) conjures up a fanciful version of what happened to that corpse when the Russians got their hands on it. It’s a story that’s part myth, part combat film and part lecture to the Nazis and Russian apologists of today.
It’s not all that, but it’s not terrible.
An old Englishwoman (Harriet Walter of “Sense & Sensibility”) confronts a young goon (David Alexander) who’s just broken into her house. His haircut, imitation concentration camp numbers and Nazi tattoos give him away.
He came there looking for something, desperate for “the real story” of what happened to that movement’s tiny-mustached icon. After tasering and drugging him, the old woman — a Jewish Russian expat — gives it to him straight. Because “I’m afraid people like you can’t simply be TOLD the truth.”
In the last days of the war, young Brana (Charlotte Vega, Netflix’s “Warrior Nun”) was an intel officer assigned to a detail that was to transport a coffin-shaped box from ravaged Berlin to Moscow. Stalin wanted “proof” Hitler was dead, and Russians, she tells us at one point, “like to look in the eyes of our enemy.”
With a captain, a colonel and five enlisted men they set out by truck for a Polish railhead. As there are German “werewolves” (die-hards) in the woods who don’t want the Soviets or the world to have “proof,” this trip will be a bloody one.
Keeping everybody on task would be hard, even if Brane wasn’t shorter and slighter than everybody else. They must bury the box each night, guard it and make sure no one can find it if they’re attacked.
But with the war all but over, the Russian soldiers want a little celebratory booze and some “spoils of war,” which Brana knows means rape victims. Only the grizzled veteran named Tor (Barry Ward of TV’s “White Lines” and “Anne Boleyn”) seems to “get” Brana’s sense of purpose.
Those tracking them have access to herbal hallucinogens as weapons, which means any given attack could convince those being attacked that there are real werewolves on the prowl. And the Polish locals, victims of years of German and Soviet depredations, aren’t going to be of any help.
Save for one. He’s played by Tom Felton.
Parker’s Estonian-shot film flicks a little Russian, Polish and German into the dialogue for “authenticity” (tee hee) and kind of runs around in circles, hinting at supernaturalism but never committing to it.
The combat is brutal, personal and features villains dropping on the first shot and “heroes” who can take a knife in the back or two and bullet or three — B-movie style.
The obstacles on this quest are underwhelming, and the locations have no hint of the larger war being fought around them or that was fought over mere days before.
Kristjan Üksküla makes a generically vile fanatical and sadistic Nazi officer, Dan Renton Skinner a murderously oafish Russian one.
The old woman storyeller framing device is a reach for “meaning” in a formulaic WWII “mission” movie, and I can’t say it adds all that much to it.
But as B-movies about Hitler’s corpse and who might have a use for it — then, and now — go, “Burial” manages to be watchable, even when it’s making your eyes roll.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual assault
Cast: Charlotte Vega, Barry Ward, Dan Renton Skinner, Kristjan Üksküla, Harriet Walter and Tom Felton.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ben Parker. An IFC Midnight release.
Running time: 1:34
This doesn’t have the studio polish — aka “money in the frame — of action auteur Walter Hill’s best Westerns — “Wild Bill,” “The Long Riders,” “Geronimo” and “Last Man Standing.”
But hell, it’s Walter Hill. He’s 80 and this could be his last roundup. Helluva cast, which includes Warren Burke and Hamish Linklater along with the Big Name leads. They knew better than to pass up a chance to work with one of the masters.
Quiver has this, not sure of a release date yet.
There’s no mistaking the look of a Fritz Lang film, especially the dark, soundstage-bound productions, with their elaborate arrangement of light, shadows and faces in the compositions.
But “Ministry of Fear,” his film of Seton I. Miller’s adaptation of a Graham Greene novel, had me double-checking the credits. Not to ensurethat Lang, the director of “M” and “Fury” and “Scarlet Street” and “The Big Heat,” was actually behind the camera. But to figure out what happened to this script.
No, that’s the right running time. It wasn’t hacked up in the ensuing years. No, this wasn’t Lang’s Hollywood debut after fleeing the Nazis. He’d made a few U.S. films already. All of those “my hotel room ransacked” references about action taken care of off-camera, that jaw-droppingly abrupt ending, were the way it “played” as released.
Compare this to the better Greene adaptations of the era — “The Third Man,” “This Gun for Hire,” “The Fallen Idol.” This script is boilerplate, perfunctory — “Confidential Agent” or “The Smugglers” directed by someone who knew where he wanted the camera and that shadow to fall over the leading man’s face ,but not fretting all that much over plot.
And. That. Plot. A man freshly-released from a mental hospital wins a cake at a rural “fete” by mistake, because Nazi spies have hidden microfilm in it? They come after it, and him, and he tries to unravel this mystery and expose their spy ring via comically direct, dangerously blunt questions about “criminal activity.” He hires a tipsy old man “private investigator,” sits through a seance and falls in with the brother-sister Austrian expat charity organizers whose lineage screams out “Suspects One and Two.”
Hitchcock would have rendered this a romp. Lang takes it ever so seriously, even at its most ludicrous.
Ray Milland is Stephen Neale, our hero, staring down a clock to the end of his incarceration when we meet him. It isn’t guilt — Catholic or otherwise (Greene’s trademark) — over how he got there that drives his actions. It’s his fear of the police locking him up again. Any spying or shooting pinned on him will be his doom.
Dan Duryea plays a scissors-wielding tailor who figures in the story, Hillary Brooke is the seductive medium who toys with our hero, even lets him have her purse pistol, at one point. Future “Batman” butler Alan Napier is a psychoanalyst who writes intellectual dissections of Naziism.
And Marjorie Reynolds and Carl Esmond are the Austrian siblings our Mr. Neale, on the lam and on the hunt for Nazis spies, falls in with.
“Ministry of Fear” has a hint of paranoia when a lot more than a hint was called for. Lang stages a visually striking shooting and unpredictable shoot out framed in an impressively deep composition.
But as Hitchcock best articulated, the great virtue of soundstage production was the degree of directorial control over what you put on film. None of the on-location variables or distractions. Lang found all these striking images, but he and Paramount didn’t wrestle the script into something with any flow to it.
Milland is passably interesting as the lead, but little of what made him crackle in his best performances is evident.
A lot of what’s “sinister” here is frittered away in one-off scenes or two-off cameos. Nothing at all is done with Duryea’s tailor, for instance. There’s no confrontation with this or that villain, on up the chain of command, leading to the spy master in charge of it all.
It’s a fast and frustrating film that seems to skip past a lot of “the good stuff.”
Watching it now, “Ministry of Fear” seems a lot more of a string of grand moments poorly-linked by blown opportunities. We see “Lang” in the credits and we leap to “classic” conclusions. To say this isn’t one of his best is about as respectful as one should get.
Rating: “approved,” violence
Cast: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Hillary Brooke, Alan Napier, Erskine Sanford and Dan Duryea
Credits: Directed by Fritz Lang, script by Seton I. Miller, based on the Graham Greene novel. A Paramount (Universal Home Video) release on Tubi, other streaming platforms.
Running time: 1:26
Disney’s new CG and live action take on the puppet who becomes a “real boy” comes to Disney+ next weekend.
Tom Hanks is Geppetto, who carved the puppet on a strong. Lots of strings.
A new singing Jiminy, Ton sings, the puppet starts singing.
Is James Corden in this?
Finn Jones, Jessica McNamee, Dana Rhodes and Donna Briscoe star in this Oct. 7 release from Blumhouse, Paramount and Epix, going straight to ye olde streaming video.
Movie Nation 