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.
“Blind Ambition” is a simple, straightforward non-fiction film about what we journalists call a “man bites dog” story. It’s about something wholly unexpected and unusual, odd and cute.
We meet a quartet of Zimbabwean refugees who fled hardship to South Africa, got jobs waiting tables and started the process of mastering fine wine at the dining establishments where they work.
They became sommeliers, wine stewards at their restaurants. And when they were good enough at it to at least earn consideration for membership on South Africa’s World Wine Tasting Championships team, they took a suggestion and formed their own Team Zim instead.
A poor, corruptly-run economic basket case country — Zimbabwe — found itself represented at the wine-identifying competition among sommeliers from around the world, held at Chateau de Gilly in France in 2017.
So, it’s “Cool Runnings” with wine, right? Not quite. This never crosses into cutesy. It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”
Filmmakers Warwick Ross and Robert Coe shadow sommeliers Joseph, Marlvin, Tinashe and Pardon as they “train.” We learn of their home lives, how they landed restaurant jobs. We see hear and see snippets of their backstories, glimpse the news coverage of the chaotic, crisis-riddled last years of Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe, the reasons these four fled. And we’re reminded of South African xenophobia, the attacks on “foreigners” that shamed the country during those days.
Wine masters, chefs, authors and others flesh out the skills they had to master and the conditions these young men had to overcome. And then we get into the nitty gritty of wine tasting, “which is not at all the same as wine-drinking,” one expert takes pains to explain.
The pragmatic value a sommelier has in a restaurant is helping diners match the “perfect” wines to their meal. In “competition,” they must show themselves to be the ultimate wine snobs, experts who can name the style, the varietal (grape), the vintage, the region and if they’re really good, the winery that bottled it.
We meet not just the Zimbabweans and the experts on refugees, Zimbabwe and wine. We’re introduced to mentors who gave them their starts, and follow them to France where their hired-by-phone French coach drags them all over wine country, from the Rhine to the Rhone, giving them an appreciation of the best the world has to offer, if nothing else.
The “blind” taste tests of competition make up the climax of the film.
There’s not a lot of “learning” about wine on the viewer’s part. As plucky and distinct as these young men are, their stories are more representative of the African refugee diaspora and its possibilities than of some “next big thing” in the wine world. South African wines are well-established. Zimbabwean wines barely known, until now. With actual home grown experts, perhaps that will change.
And thanks to the competition, in which the team tastes, studies and compares notes — debating what this or that wine is in two minute evaluations — the third act of “Blind Ambition” is livelier than the first two.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Joseph Dhafana, Marlvin Gewese, Pardon Tagazu and Tinashe Nyamudoka.
Credits: Directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, scripted by Robert Coe, Paul Murphy and Madeleine Ross. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:36
This BBC/Amazon Studios production features Chaske Spencer, Rafe Spall, Toby Jones, Stephen Rea and Ciaran Hinds in supporting roles.
Filmed in Oklahoma, six episodes worth, which is a good thing.
Close your eyes and you can pretty much imagine the full “package” of a movie that would make its premiere on Comedy Central.
It’d be derivative — familiar and “new” at the same time. Maybe update “The Office” for the Zoom Meeting era, with ditzy “types” over-sharing, accidentally or on purpose, the most intimate details of their messy lives.
“How do I ‘mute?'” “How do I ‘Leave Meeting?'”
The cast? Same deal, mix the familiar with the new. Put Jason Alexander and Cheri Oteri in small roles, give Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones and Jay Pharaoh supporting parts and make the perky “New Ellie Kemper/Kimmy Schmidt” your lead.
“Out of Office” was scripted and directed by an “Office” writer and on-air regular, Paul Lieberstein, who was the put-upon HR nebbish on the show. It’s not his first directorial rodeo, but since no one saw the adorable “Song of Back and Neck,” he returned to the comic situation that keeps on giving for his latest, another story of the cutesy, quarrelsome workplace “family” that has been a fact of life for American sitcoms, if not “real life,” since “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
It’s got a few laughs and a tiny dollop of heart, and wouldn’t have made a dime in theaters or much of a splash on Netflix or Paramount+. But it fits Comedy Central to a T.
Milana Vayntrub of the early years of “This Is Us” stars as Eliza, whom we meet as she’s escorted out of her latest workplace, a cardboard box with her belongings in it. She’s 28 and this isn’t her first “escort.” That’s why she’s cut-off in the middle of asking her parents (Oteri and Alexander) for money, brushing past the “Whattaya think room and BOARD is?” Because they’re selling the house she’s been mooching off them in to retire and move to Paris.
Eliza’s checkered employment history and lifetime of odd, impulsive choices means her exasperated dad won’t give her money before they board the plane. No, any cash she might need is entrusted to her younger, more responsible dental-hygienist sister.
Not to worry. That next job could be as close as the next job interview. It isn’t just the screwball in charge (Jeong) of this online help line who chats her up. He Zooms in the entire screwball staff (Emily Pendergast, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Elaine Carroll and Pharaoh) for the interview, which goes poorly until Eliza tells the boss what the others won’t — aka “what he wants to hear” about how to deal with his ongoing fight with his ever-escalating wife (Jones). Yeah, it’s bad advice and everybody else knows it. Consequence-free Eliza shrugs it off and gets the job.
But Mom’s parting words — “His marriage IS your job!” — should sink in. Think before you speak, give better suggestions and hope you’re a help. That’s a steep learning curve for Eliza to climb. Let’s see if she can manage it.
Liberstein populates this “Office” with absurdly-familiar, broadly drawn caricatures — the clueless guy in charge, the shaved-head, camo-clad veteran (Carroll), the argumentative over-qualified hunk (Smith), the too-nice wife (Pendergast) who shares too much of her not-able-to-conceive life with her office-mates, with her over-sharing husband (Chris Gethard) also working from their dormer office, free to blurt random input into every conversation. And then there’s our common sensible guy who went to the same college as Eliza (Pharoah), the “Designated Jim” (romantic interest) here, for those who remember the NBC TV series Lieberstein is recycling.
The banter is funny enough, starting with the Q&A job interview for work “literally ANYbody can do.”
“I see you’ve had a lot of…short time jobs?” “Yes. Thank you!”
A little office politics is introduced. A take-over is coming. The boss’s marital arguments turn uglier, more profane, more sexual and even scatological.
Then there are the little gems that would grab attention at any table read or writers brainstorming session for a sitcom. Jones’ wife character threatens to cheat with their aged neighbor, played by Monte Markham who makes that funny. Somebody plots throwing a “surprise” birthday party in the middle of an already-planned office party. (I can see Steve Carell trying that on “The Office.”).
And the staff’s way of calming boss Kyle in a bad moment is suggesting “a ‘Babe’ break.” That little interlude is just adorable.
Vayntrub makes a pleasant enough lead who would have been helped by sharper writing — more interesting character traits, funnier situations, a more obstacle-filled attempted courtship and funnier dialogue.
As with a lot of sitcoms, the idea here is to surround the romantic leads with funnier folk, and that works. Jones and Jeong on down the line deliver, with even “Office” alum Oscar Nunez scoring in a single scene as the new owner, bragging about taking “little companies” and making them into “great ones.” Quite the Mexican success story.
“My father lets me buy one company every two years!”
As a film, though, “Out of Office” plays more like a pilot to a sitcom that never was, a project any principled network “suit” would watch and dismiss.
“Too derivative,” she’d say. “We’ve already SEEN ‘The Office.'”
Rating: unrated, sexual situations, toilet humor, profanity (TV-14)
Cast: Milana Vayntrub, Jay Pharoah, Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones, Oscar Nunez, Emily Pendergast, Chris Gethard, Elaine Carroll, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Cheri Oteri and Jason Alexander.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Lieberstein. A Paramount/MTV Films release (Sept. 5) on Comedy Central.
Running time: 1:26
“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul” is a dark comedy about a prosperity gospel megachurch preacher and his wife’s “comeback” from a fall from grace. First-time feature director Adamma Ebo got very lucky that Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall were dazzled enough by her script that they signed on. They’re so good that the viewer, like Ebo, can lose track of the fact this was supposed to be funny.
Hall, most recently impressive in “Master” and on TV’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” and “This is Us” Emmy-winner Brown give us brilliantly-detailed portrayals of a prayerful power couple, brittle but hanging on, putting on brave, smiling faces because they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get back what they just lost.
We see and hear Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs speak and “perform,” and the mansion, the “beautiful Bugatti,” the Prada suits and the gigantic Wander to Greener Paths church need no explanation. He is electric in the pulpit, beaming and upbeat, handsome and the epitome of preaching charisma.
He peacocks his latest outfit — “Don’t it look like I’ve been favoring the Lord?”
And sitting at his side, often in chairs that would put Buckingham Palace to shame, is his beaming, cheerleading, stylishly-turned-out Trinitie, aka “First Lady” Childs, his beautiful wife.
But when we meet them, it’s in an empty megachurch. He is hyped-up about the documentary film crew, seen once and almost never heard, that’s just started to follow them around, “fly on the wall” style, to capture their “comeback.”
A montage of TV coverage buzzes about the “scandal” that brought them down. But Atlanta’s Black “Jim and Tammy Fay” are hellbent on winning back the congregation that abandoned them, certain that their showmanship and earnest “self-forgiveness” will let them put whatever threatens to take all this away “behind” them.
But the film crew captures the tension in their desperation and the veneer that each wears over their egos about this humiliating state of affairs and the fragile, brittle state of their marriage.
Pastor Lee-Childs has a profane flip-out over stepping in gum in his designer Italian shoes. “First Lady” snaps “won’t nothing ever confirmed” about the sexual misconduct scandal that emptied their church and took a bite out of their bank accounts — “settlement” money.
And we see the glower in their eyes — beaming faces notwithstanding — when they speak of the on-the-rise Heaven’s Home Church down the road, and the righteous young preaching couple (Nicole Beharie and Conphidance) who opportunistically swooped in and swept away much of their congregation.
As Lee-Childs trots out ideas to get attention for their big Easter Sunday reopening and rehearses in front of Trinitie and “The Devout 5” — the congregants who refused to bail on them — their boundless optimism frays under the strain, Lee-Childs’ “scandal” explains itself and First Lady’s demands for him to “get it all back” turn strident.
Hall and Brown are never less than credible, so much so that we feel for these two in those moments when we forget we’re not supposed to. They create a couple that has endured even as it has made its own allowances for disappointments and concessions to “whatever works” that keeps them together. Brown’s job here is to sparkle and sizzle with energy and charisma. Hall’s is to let us see the bargain Trinitie’s struck in her mind.
The “mockumentary” format of the film works, but has felt played if not played-out since “The Office” had its run. Then Ebo takes us into the bedroom and we start to notice that she’s not consistent in showing us only what the “fly on the wall” filmmakers see.
But writer-director Ebo’s most obvious mistake here is assuming all of this is funny, just in its presentation. In post-hypocrisy American Christianity, a “scandal” that the scandalous expect their gullible followers to ignore is old hat. Greedy, smirking preachers lying and fund-raising from the pulpit, inveighing against “the homosexual agenda” and demanding charity and forgiveness when they’re not the first to offer the same isn’t funny any more.
And expecting laughs from the “purple Prada, peach Prada, periwinkle Prada” and “peal Prada” suits and Trinitie’s outlandish (ish) hats is twenty years of Tyler Perry movies out of date.
The deeper into this story that the movie gets and the darker things turn, the more we see this tale the way the stars do — as a tragedy only in the eyes of its two main characters. Brown and Hall elevate this low-hanging-fruit simply because they have to.
Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Cast: Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown and Nicole Beharie
Credits: Scripted and directed by Adamma Ebo. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:42
Women drive half of the story threads of the latest version of “The Lord of the Rings,” and that’s a definite broadening of perspective for the Amazon-created origin story “The Rings of Power.”
But is it enough to answer that nagging question that hangs over every sequel, prequel or franchise reboot? “Why was this made, again?”
It’s familiar enough for even a casual fan to follow, a tale with beautiful elves and pan-ethnic humans and Irish-accented Harfoots (Harfeet?) of the Hobbit persuasion. And the dwarves are Scots, because of course they are.
It’s a good-looking series, if not a particularly cinematic take on the epic fairytale. That unmistakable generic “green screen” (fake backdrops) lighting bathes most characters in most interiors. The musical score rises to “adequate.” The forced-perspective that makes hobbits look hobbit-sized is underwhelming. And the exteriors — New Zealand or not — are fairly humdrum — mountains and digital cities seen from afar, impressive-enough tank-work for a storm at sea bit.
The dialogue has its pithy moments, and overall, I’d say the writing is canonical enough for the Tolkien crowd. Lots of solid dwarvish wisdom.
“Thair can be noooo troost between hammer and rock,” the wonderful Peter Mullan, as the dwarf king, intones. “Eventually, one of the other must surely break.”
But is this trip to Middle Earth sure to be a rewarding one, and worth eight hours of our while? For five years? That’s surprisingly hard to say, based on the first two episodes Amazon provides. The opening is a talky, backstory-and-exposition-heavy drag while the second installment finally gets around to giving us a little humor, bigger blasts of action and the latest cinematic incarnation of an orc.
We follow five basic story threads. Galadriel the evilish warrior princess, played by Morfydd Clark of “Saint Maude,” is on a quest to finish the Sauron-hunting job her brother began. Yes, pre-“Rings” Sauron was already a “cruel and cunning sorcerer” and on the lam. Perhaps in the frozen north?
The “politician” Elrond (Robert Aramayo) would like to guide his people to a different future, perhaps with the aid of the great smithy Celbrimbor (Charles Edwards). Some sort of negotiation with the dwarves is in order, if they can be reasoned with inside their mountain fastness.
The human Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi of “Homeland” and “How I Met Your Mother”) fell in love with an elf lieutenant Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova of “Mary Queen of Scots” and “Berlin Station”). But now, their borderlands village’s guardposts are being abandoned as “the long war is over” with the evil ones. Arondir’s leave-taking has him wondering if this is a good idea, and separately, he and Bronwyn and her curious son (Tyroe Muhafidin) are about to find out if he’s right.
The Harfoots — hunter-gatherer hobbits of a migratory sort — have long depended on the wisdom of Sadoc Burrows (Brit TV vet Lenny Henry). But when the curious Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Mari (Sara Zwangobani) stumble into The Stranger (Daniel Weyman), a slow-to-speak “giant” (human) who fell out of a shooting star and a creature with particular skills, everybody’s on uncertain ground.
“The Lord of the Rings” made big stars out of a couple of actors, but a few players — Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Liv Tyler and even Sean Astin — came into it as pretty big names. That’s not where Amazon spent its money here, and that matters.
Because one thing that would help get this story on its feet quicker is star power — players who know how to use a close-up, strike a dramatic pose and make a story feel larger than life. Expecting everybody here to “grow into” the character is a reach, and a handicap in the early going. This is a generally colorless lot.
Boniadi impresses, Weyman’s Stranger intrigues. But truthfully, this enterprise doesn’t find its footing until it ventures underground with the bellowing, chiseling dwarves. Mullan, long a favorite among Scottish character actors (“Westworld,” “Tommy’s Honor,” “Hector”) lights up the series the moment he shows up, and Owain Arthur makes his mark as King Durin’s bearded blustery son.
It’s one thing to give Galadriel the most agency. But one can only hope Clark develops some swagger as the series progresses. It’s helpful to remember that Elrond is her cousin, because lowering our expectations of what their shared scenes portend is a must. Aramayo (“The King’s Man”) comes off awfully bland in the early going.
What’s left is pointlessly humorless and self-serious without stakes.
Let’s hope the whole enterprise gets better as the story reaches the middle acts and makes its turn towards the finish. Because I have to say, “Rings of Power” does not overwhelm, dazzle or sprint out of the gate.
Rating: TV-14, violence,
Cast: Morfydd Clark, Nazanin Boniadi, Ismael Cruz Cordoba, Robert Aramayo, Markella Kavenagh, Daniel Weyman and Peter Mullan
Credits: Created by Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. An Amazon Prime release.
Running time: Eight episodes @1:00 each.
A poor teen wants to break free of poverty via bio hop stardom.
Sept. 23 on Paramount Plus.
Movie Nation 