Ok, that’s a little pushy, “Stop what you’re doing” and all.
But I laughed at a couple of the silly conceits of this Daniel Radcliffe star vehicle.
Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento? I’m totally there.
Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But Nov. 4, Roku let’s us find out.
Here’s a creepy indie snapshot of America at this moment — performative, attention-grabbing, impulsive and child-exploitation obsessed.
“Low Life” is a jittery, nerve-wracking thriller, a peek behind the “gotcha” cell phone camera of a confrontational stalker-of-stalkers. It’s also a commentary of the golden age of “projection,” a picture that asks what some of the people who are so obsessed with this subject — the quickest to scream “PEDOPHILE” at others — might have on their Internet search history.
Director Tyler Michael James and screenwriters Hunter Milano and Noah Rotter take us into the life of a Youtube exposer of pedophiles, an amped-up catfisher-for-“justice” who goes by Creep Dunk.
And even as it sometimes lapses into melodrama and goes off the deep end, it’s a seriously unsettling ride.
Benny Jansen, given Big Fanatic Energy by Wes Dunlap — is scoring page-view fame and getting the attention of the local PD in his corner of suburban Nevada. As Creep Dunk, he takes tips from fans and sets out to entrap men into approaching underage girls on the Internet. He walks viewers through the icky online conversations — the genital photos — and then videos the moment he meets and confronts these pervs.
Benny is brazen and unafraid. Benny is also a drama queen, primping and rehearsing his bits, lapsing into his best Travis Bickle tough-guy-who-might-be-psycho speech to get his game face on. He’s deep down the Holden Caulfield rabbit hole, “saving” girls from “predators,” a catcher in the wi-fi.
He self-righteously claps-back at a TV reporter who ambushes the ambusher, expressing “the sheriff’s” concerns about the “vigilante” illegality of what he’s doing.
But things chance when we see him light into the subject of an “investigation,” only to have the guy “make” him — “We went to high school together. You’re Benny Jansen, aren’t you?”
As Benny freaks out at this exposing of the exposer, he web searches for gun shops and buys “protection.” But a peek inside Benny’s life tells us why he never took that step before now.
A trip back to his old high school summons up formative memories. He used to be the star basketball player, used to be the biggest guy on the court. Benny used to be a bully. It’s not like he changed all that much.
But he has this equally-obsessed teen fan-girl (Lucy Urbano) passing on tips and siccing him on a friend’s “creeper” dad. She’s even more impulsive, less mature and less filtered. Benny’s desperate to please her, or at least not let “the fans” down.
“Low Life” takes us through Benny’s dark night of the soul, full of revelations, confrontations, violence and ugly self-discovery as he sucks a couple of old pals (Hunter Milano and Jake Dvorsky) into his obsession and his world.
James’s debut feature has its “Oh, come on” moments. But even with the occasional far-fetched turn, it’s always a bracing film, skating by on Dunlap’s nervous energy and Urbano’s heedless, never-consider-consequences high school kid.
“Low Life” is edited to the beat of a pulsating synthesizer score by Zach Michel — quick cuts, extreme close-ups, “glasses camera” shots and cell-phone video and snaps. The point-of-view wanders, like a “found footage” venture that abandons that weary conceit early on.
But they’re onto something here, a story very much of its moment. “Low Life” taps into the ugly, child-abusing zeitgeist. It toys with the “cops haven’t figured out which side they’re on” paranoia, and insane “Pizzagate” endgame of crazed vigilantism.
It’s never shy about turning the camera around on the self-righteous and suggesting “Let he who is without a sketchy side cast the first stone.”
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, pedophilia subject, profanity
Cast: Wes Dunlap, Lucas Neff, Lucy Urbano, Hunter Milano and Jake Dvorsky
Credits: Directed by Tyler Michael James, scripted by Hunter Milano and Noah Rotter. An XYZ release.
Running time: 1:44
A tattooed, pink-haired punk scrambles onto an inter-city bus, still bleeding from his latest piercing — a bullet wound to the gut.
It’ll be all right, Freddy assures his fevered pal JJ. Meet me at the bus station in Lake City. He’s got the drugs. He’s got the cash. He has a pistol.
But the low-heat panic in both their voices rises an octave when they figure out that Mac, their third musketeer, has been grabbed by the gangster Vic. Freddy fills the night with frantic phone calls from his two phones — to JJ, to buck him up, dodging incoming threats from Vic, begging for help from his baby mama and his ex-con Dad.
Whatever JJ’s prospects, Freddy is in a panic that this bus ticket from (I guess) Jacksonville to Lake City to Valdosta and Cairo (Ga.) is only going “One Way.”
A lean, somewhat tense going-into-shock blur of a film noir, “One Way” is measurably simpler and better than director Andrew Baird’s previous outing behind the camera, a cheesy “Blade Runner” impersonation titled “Zone 414.”
The entire story’s basically on a bus, with hazy flashbacks, Freddy (Colson Baker) bleeding and calling his nurse/ex Christine (Meagan Holder) who takes his calls while racing down hospital corridors pushing a gurney to an O.R., calming biz partner JJ (Luis Da Silva Jr.) down as he chases the bus in his Camaro for this planned meet-up/pick-up, or that one.
The calls to a beat-up trailer in BFE, Georgia aren’t getting Freddy anywhere. His old man (Kevin Bacon) is a drawling ex-con with no driving privileges and just enough knowledge of the nature of Freddy’s trouble to be worthy of his nickname — “Ass—e.”
And then there’s the deadly Vic (Drea de Matteo), closing in on them all, torturing JJ and Freddy’s third partner and hellbent on getting her drugs and her money back.
But things aren’t nearly so cut-and-dried on the bus. There’s this pesky girl (Storm Reid) who seems to have her own phone, but who keeps begging to borrow one of Freddy’s to call some guy she’s traveling to meet.
“How OLD are you?” gets a lot of different answer from her every time she opens her mouth.
At one stop, a stranger gets on (Travis Fimmel) and gets in Freddy’s business. As Freddy drifts in and out of shock, he keeps muttering this mantra, sometimes on the phone to his ex, sometimes to himself.
“I’m doin’ this for Lily.”
Baird, working from a Ben Conway screenplay, keeps things basic and still manages to struggle with coherence and clarity. Mumbled dialogue, hallucinations of characters we can’t quite identify, the torrent of phone calls and the “complications” presented by the shifting dynamics on board the bus make this movie more “lean” than “clean.”
Baker, aka “Machine Gun Kelly,” has basically two notes to play all the way through this, which renders the performance “authentic” without being all that compelling. Yeah, we know Freddy “took something that doesn’t belong to me.” We kind of want more than that, more than him getting involved in the drama the girl who keeps borrowing his phone generates.
“One Way” takes on the tenor of a droning bus trip, with little flashes of fear, dreamed accounts of how he got here and long, fuzzy and dull interludes between them.
Yes, it’s better than “Zone 414.” Baird, and his sometimes muse Fimmel, are heading in the right direction. But this more tight if a tad tedious thriller doesn’t quite finish the trip or seal the deal.
Rating: R, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Colson Baker, Drea de Matteo, Storm Reid, Meagan Holder, Travis Fimmel and Kevin Bacon
Credits: Directed by Andrew Baird, scripted by Ben Conway. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:35
It begins with a surprisingly touching tragedy, morphs into a cute story of hope and then hurls itself headlong into a nasty take on one corner of the animal rights debate.
“Gigi & Nate” is what happens when you round up a good cast and a pretty polished director for a screenplay that turns away from its strengths, takes a swing at “important,” and misses.
British actor Charlie Rowe of the recent “Vanity Fair” adaptation for TV stars as Nate, a Nashville teen who takes that one fateful dive into a sink hole pond near the family’s N.C. mountains vacation rental. He didn’t hit the water wrong, or hit rocks once he went in. A virus in the water has him sick and feverish within hours, diagnosed with encephalitis leading to quadriplegia within days.
His mother (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden), father (Jim Belushi), sisters (Josephine Langford, Hannah Riley) and grandma (Diane Ladd) are distraught. College, “a normal life,” it’s all off the table, now. Nate, weepy and wailing in pain in a wheelchair, takes a shot at ending things by the means at hand — the family koi pond.
“I don’t want to be more of a burden to everyone than I already am,” he says later.
“Hope” comes from rehab and physical therapy. And “help” arrives in the form of a service animal, skittish and very smart Gigi, a capuchin monkey whom we saw rescued from a neglectful traveling petting zoo near Joshua Tree, California in the film’s opening scene. Years of training later, she’s here to be a companion, be a responsibility, be a friend and fetch the paintbrush for Nate’s paint-with-his-teeth art or grab something off the supermarket shelf.
And that’s where the new problems begin. Nate and Gigi are already social media darlings and the subject of debate. That supermarket visit turns everything ugly and public as an animal rights activist (Tara Summers) rallies her troops against the guy stuck in a wheelchair for life.
I’ve liked other films by Northern Irish director Nick Hamm. “The Journey” was good, “Killing Bono” wasn’t terrible even if “Godsend” was. But a quick online search reveals how divisive this issue is, with the countries where capuchin live in the wild banning their capture and being kept as pets, and other cities, states and countries banning primate pets for health, safety and moral reasons.
A lot of diseases make the leap from primate to primate from monkeys and apes.
Any movie that takes a stand on this issue as a major subtext is wading into a no-win scenario.
Producer turned screenwriter David Hudgens and Hamm leave all subtlety out of their depictions of shrill, fanatical activists (In Nashville?), and undercut their take on this issue in the process.
What savvy animal rights organization would go public attacking the service animal of a kid in a wheelchair? The optics are terrible, and other targets would be an easier sell to the public.
Harden, Rowe and Belushi are excellent, with Zoe Margaret Colletti doing the best she can with the cute but wholly illogical (We meet her as a local in rural NC, and she turns up in Nashville.) and under-scripted love interest part. Langford has a nice scene that underscores the weight such a calamity puts on an entire family and its future.
And Ladd cranks up another drawling, no-nonsense granny turn.
But all that goes for naught as the third act stumbles into a trap of the myopic screenwriter’s own making.
Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and language.
Cast: Charlie Rowe, Marcia Gay Harden, Zoe Margaret Colletti,
Josephine Langford, Hannah Riley, Tara Summers, Jim Belushi and Diane Ladd.
Credits: Directed by Nick Hamm, scripted by David Hudgens. A Roadside Attractions/Hulu release.
Running time: 1:54
“Simchas & Sorrows” is a New York dramedy built around a Catholic-Jewish relationship, an unfortunately drab little movie entirely too tentative for its own good.
Its “edge” is the call for one member of the couple to “convert,” something the movie pokes at with trigger phrases like “chosen people,” “Palestine,” “tribal unity” and “fear of diluting our heritage,” which, any way you say it, can’t help but sound racist.
But writer-director Genevieve Adams’ script backs away from that edge when it counts, and can’t find a laugh to save its or her life.
Throw in the fact that veteran bit player Adams makes herself the lead, and probably realizes only now that she’s too inexpressive and bland to carry a picture, even her own.
Yes, that photo above aptly captures her performance.
She plays Agnes, who even as a child, pondered the difference between Catholicism and Judaism when she figured out that hey, Jesus was a Jew, after all.
As an adult, aspiring actress/aspiring playwright/elementary school drama teacher and sometime Zumba instructor Agnes finds out she’s pregnant the day her beau, Levi (Thomas McDonnell) throws a “surprise” proposal party, with his family pouring onto their roof-patio, all “Mazel tovs” and “Oy veys.”
“Simcha & Sorrows” leans into the Hebrew and Yiddish exclamations and Jewish kvetching and kvelling stereotypes. A few of the attempted laughs come from pregnant actress Agnes trying to “fit in” and deploy such words like a pro to her fiance, her Jewish agents, her husband and in-laws and the rabbi (Hari Nef) who leads their “Journey into Judaism” conversion class.
Those jokes, like too much of this sad-mouthed rom-com, fall flat.
The potential for real conflict is introduced and basically abandoned as the script struggles to figure out what it wants to say. The problem is, one suspects, that figuring out what one CANNOT say ate up a lot of time in the writing and financing as well.
Testy debates in their “Journey” class cut off with invocations of “anti-Semitism” and “The Holocaust.” This is promising ground for a debate between an atheist, in Agnes’ case, or others “marrying into” the faith, and “the tribe,” almost uniformly depicted as dogmatic, uncompromising and thin-skinned.
John Cullum charms in a couple of scenes as Agnes’ aged ex-Broadway hoofer granddad. He even sings.
Nefi, who has played her share of rabbis, almost makes this one funny.
And Annelise Cepero sets off a few sparks as an obnoxious influencer/brand ambassador and “healer,” converting so that she’s allowed to marry Levi’s equally obnoxious brother.
The “Simcha” in the title translates to “joy” or “joys.” It was also the name of the late Jewish screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s production company.
But “Simchas & Sorrows” doesn’t have much of either.
The conflict is watered-down, the picture has no urgency or pacing, the “sparks” are in short supply, and Adams’ deadpan take on Agnes may play to her strengths, or be the only note she knows and we can’t tell the difference.
Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Genevieve Adams, Thomas McDonnell, Hari Nef, Luke Forbes, Annalise Cepero, Chip Zien and Johyn Cullum.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Genevieve Adams. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:57
This trailer shows off a seriously funny, and “experienced” cast — Judy Greer, Johnny Knoxville, Paul Reiser and Keegan-Michael Key — and a borderline edgy premise, a sort of “Full House” hit of the past re-launched with the same players, and a nasty, sexual, always-do-the-wrong-thing-THIS-time ethos.
Sept. 20. Color me intrigued.
Fifty years after its release, screed-writing screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s dark comedy “The Hospital” still has the power to make your jaw drop.
Released amid growing cynicism about institutions that Vietnam inspired and Watergate proved, with documentaries such as “Titicut Follies” laying bare the stark realities of American medicine and “M*A*S*H” puncturing the TV-burnished image of doctors as “ministering angels,” “Hospital” must have felt like a kick in the teeth.
The ensuing decades have seen nothing that went this far, with only TV’s “Saint Elsewhere” and a few edgier moments on the soapier “E.R.” or comical “Scrubs” etc. even trying.
That said, the black humor in Arthur Hiller’s “comedy” doesn’t really start to work until late in the picture. And it takes the ears and eyes a while to adjust to any visit to Paddy Chayefskyland. Few conversations sound natural. Characters launch into speeches and others in the scene simply yield the floor to them. Casting Oscar winner George C. Scott as the lead meant the near-soliloquies would be epic, scene-chewing rants.
The acclaimed playwright, screenwriter and novelist, already an Oscar winner for “Marty,” was sort of the Stanley Kubrick of screenplays. He demanded complete control over his pictures (“Network,” a few years later, was his masterpiece) based on a cultivated reputation as a “genius.” But look at the years of credits leading to “The Hospital” and name one that earned him this license — casting control, producing control, his almost-unique (in the U.S.) “by” credit, as opposed to “written by” or “screenplay by.”
They gave it to him because, like Kubrick, he had the cheek to demand it. And in a town of hacks, Hollywood knew a genius when it was run over by one. Chayefsky even delivers the film’s biting, cynical opening narration.
Scott plays Dr. Herbert Bock, chief of medicine at Manhattan Medical Center (actually filmed in a new wing of New York’s Metropolitan Hospital). He looks a wreck and in a theatrical blast of exposition declares “I’m 53, with all the attendant fears. I’ve just left my wife.” Oh, and by the by, he’s depressed and suicidal.
When we dive into his workplace — a chaotic, noisy and crowded house of healing — we get it. A modern viewer will instantly wonder “How the hell did they keep it all together and keep track of who was whom” in that pre-digital age?
Because very quickly the answer becomes obvious — not well at all.
A “horn dog” resident eagerly notes the passing of a patient, giving him and his latest paramour nurse a (semi-private) room for their nightly assignation. He winds up dozing off, getting the dosage of the dead man by a nurse just doing what the chart says, and dying.
Over the course of the next day and a night, others will die, some will be clubbed by an unseen assailant, the hospital will come under siege for its efforts to demolish a neighboring tenement for expansion, the harried chief administrator (Stephen Elliott) will try to juggle all this, Dr. Bock will drink Smirnoff’s and try to pretend that he’s struggling to remember the names of the sea of white (mostly) male residents he leads on rounds and the frazzled billing officer (Frances Sternhagen, funny) will try to get the “Blue Cross? Blue Shield?” particulars from patients because the arrogant medicos — doctors and nurses — can’t be bothered.
“I mean I have to bill these people. I know you doctors are the ministering angels and I’m the bitch from the accounting department, but I’ve a job to do too. I mean, if you don’t mind, Doctor!”
Actors must have loved working for New York Paddy. Such glorious, long, attention-grabbing speeches, with everybody of any note in the cast getting one or even two.
Dr. Bock insults a careless, bottom-line lusting colleague (Edward Dysart, years before “L.A. Law”) — “You’re greedy, unfeeling, inept, indifferent, self-inflating, and unconscionably profitable. Besides that, I have nothing against you. I’m sure you play a hell of a game of golf.
There’s Barbara (Diana Rigg), the half-Bock’s-age (in the script) daughter of a mistreated patient (Barnard Hughes), a woman who brings in an Apache healer from the tribe she and her father minister to in Mexico.
“I fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway upstairs. I said to Mr. Blacktree, ‘Who’s that hulking bear of a man?’ Apaches are reverential about bears. Won’t eat bear meat, never skin bears. Bears are thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. Men with bear power are highly respected and are said to be great healers. ‘That man,‘ I said, ‘gets his power from the bear.'”
You can be a fan of the writing while acknowledging Chayefsky’s penchant for male wish fulfillment fantasy romantic pairings — “Network’s” ancient William Holden pursued by bombshell Faye Dunaway, Rigg mini-skirting her way through Dr. Bock’s self-declared “impotence.”
Different era, that’s for sure.
Hiller, an accomplished comic director who went on to film “Silver Streak” and “The In-Laws” as well as sappy romances, had already made a dark and semi-daring comedy with Chayefsky, “The Americanization of Emily,” a talk-you-to-death skewering of the notion of “war hero.” Hiller’s chief contribution to “Hospital” was in keeping every shot so crowded it’s a wonder anybody had elbow room to apply a stethoscope, much less a scalpel.
The only player in the cast who treats this as an outright farce is the wild-eyed Hughes, who played two roles (he was also a mustachioed, flabbergasted, error prone surgeon) and kind of takes over the third act. Scott plays it straight, if often over the top and LOUD, as was his style.
But that’s just right for the film’s scathing, perplexed undertone of high dudgeon.
“How the hell is this allowed to happen?”
Rewatching “The Hospital” now I was struck by how much impact it plainly had in how such houses of healing are portrayed, how the darkly funny stuff lands a bit softer and how nobody writes dialogue this arch any more, and for good reason. It’s so self-conscious that it takes one right out of the scene at times.
“You know, when I say impotent, I don’t mean merely limp… When I say impotent, I mean I’ve lost even my desire to work. That’s a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I’ve lost my reason for being – my purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.”
Who in heaven’s name talks like that, tells a beautiful woman they’ve just met that, outside of the printed page? And what was Chayefsky confessing here?
The “romance” between Bock and “Miss Drummond” is about as flesh and blood realistic and organically romantic as that moment a guy asks the sex worker “How much?”
Hughes would play many grumpy doctors over the years, in the sitcom “Doc” and later as the curmudgeon “Doc Hollywood” takes over for, a film which also-starred Sternhagen. Nancy Marchand, whose big break was co-starring in Chayefsky’s “Marty,” plays the ever-brow-beaten head of nursing. Her “Lou Grant” co-star Robert Walden plays an internist/confidante to Dr. Bock. And Stockard Channing (in her first screen appearance) and Katherine Helmond pop in the single scene each appears in.
It’s not the over-the-top hoot “Network” turned out to be. The topline characters simply aren’t as interesting, and the surrounding cast is often nameless — so much so that the business of giving Hughes two roles trips the movie up in a too-obvious way.
And whatever Chayefsky’s encounters with soulless “modern medicine” were, it was the profit-uber-alles world of TV he knew like the back of the hand he slapped it with. Still he, Hiller and Scott created a template for that every drama or comedy that followed with this film about America’s “most enormous medical… entity ever conceived,” built on the profit principle, leading to patients who “are sicker than ever.”
Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual content and drug references
Cast: George C. Scott, Diana Rigg, Nancy Marchand, Stephen Elliott, Frances Sternhagen, Robert Walden, Richard Dysart and Barnard Hughes.
Credits: Directed by Arthur Hiller, scripted by Paddy Chayefsky. A United Artists (MGM/UA) release on Tubi, Amazon and other streamers
Running time: 1:43
Not an action film. Not really sci-fi. Kind of a comedy?
“Jean Reno as you’ve NEVER seen him before!”
Love that Jean Reno.
A few classics are being re-released this coming weekend, and the most recent “Spider-Man” will be back, if you missed it.
Surely there’ll be something you haven’t seen worth checking out on National Cinema Day, Sept. 3.
$3 tickets? Worth it just for the AC, in my book.
There’s not much to “the Last Film of the Summer,” Screen Gems’ “The Invitation” — no wit, few frights and not much in the way of thrills, either.
But then, you got that much out of the trailer, didn’t you?
It’s about a beautiful young New York ceramics artist named Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel of “Game of Thrones”) who just lost her second parent, only to discover she’s got relatives over in Jolly Olde.
This much you figured out from the trailer.
Evie’s sassy BFF (Courtney Taylor) agrees with her assessment, looking over the DNA website’s family tree, that they are the “whitest people” ever.
Got that from the trailer.
But her new “cousin,” Oliver (Hugh Skinner) jets over to meet her and begs her to let him fly her back for a big Alexander family wedding.
He’s the one posh twerp “wearing the ascot” in the trailer.
The Gothic decor of New Carfax (Hah!) Manor is her first clue as to what’s afoot. The pale, vulpine looks of the smoldering Lord DeVille (Ha-HAH!), played by Thomas Doherty, are another.
He’s the one with his shirt open to the waist…in the trailer.
Yup, these people are the English Undead, and Evie’s got herself in over her head in a production-designed-to-death British Gothic vampire movie.
Something we all knew that from the trailer.
About the only “spoiler” not in the gives-away-the-movie previews is how slow and tedious Jessica M. Thompson’s film is. Almost nothing of interest happens for well over an hour. The obligatory sexual come-on is preordained to be PG-13. So fixate on how beautiful everybody is, because there’s no clever banter, no chilling “secret,” no fright we don’t see coming or that doesn’t play as a cheap jolt — bargain basement cheap, here.
But you’ve got to reach for reflexive “cheap” scares because everybody watching this knows the formula and has seen what’s coming.
That’s the problem with thrillers that give away the whole damned movie in the trailer.
Rating: PG-13 for terror, violent content, some strong language, sexual content and partial nudity.
Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Thomas Doherty, Stephanie Corneliussen, Alana Boden, Sean Pertwee and Hugh Skinner.
Credits: Directed by Jessica M. Thompson, scripted by Blair Butler. A Sony/Screen Gems release.
Running time: 1:44
Movie Nation 