I reviewed this engaging and informative rocker doc about a ground breaking female band some months back, and how it’s time for the folks who use the Orange County Library System, South Trail Branch, to check this pre-Runaways ensemble out.
Remember, donate your DVDs to your local public library. They’ll expand their collection or sell them as a way of raising cash for more books.
MovieNation, bringing cutting edge screen culture to the Southeast, one DVD, one library at a time.
As 30 year-old whose belief that she’s “a 70 year-old woman trapped in the body of a 30 year-old” is tested out via “past life regression,” Diane Keaton shrieks and sputters, totters on towering high-heel thigh-high boots and tumbles into pools in exasperation in “Mack & Rita,” a comedy in which she plays the AARP version of Elizabeth Lail.
It’s a limp noodle version of “Big” — a “body switch” comedy whose best bits are montages, scenes of a 30 year-old waking up with Keaton’s manic energy, statuesque beauty and one-of-a-kind fashion sense, a senior citizen forced into “influencer” appearances at power pilates workouts, female empowerment rallies and the like. In those quick cuts, the sight gag of hippest-granny-ever Keaton bouncing around doing stuff that would challenge women half her age is a hoot.
The rest of the movie isn’t exactly hoot-free. But the strain of every “get me rewrite” line, the forced jocularity of “Rita” mixing it up with her new-friends/peers (Loretta Devine, Lois Smith, Amy Hill and Wendy Malick) and clumsily-handled hint of romance with much younger dog walker Jack (Dustin Milligan) shows.
And the whole enterprise is Exhibit A that the actress-turned-director Kate Aselton is no better at comedy than she was at thrillers (“Black Rock”).
Lail, of TV’s “Ordinary Girl” and “Gossip Girl” reboot plays Mack, a published author who idolized her late grandmother in her childhood, and finds herself emulating her style of dress and disdain for the hip, the faddish and her peers’ idea of “fun.” She’s got writer’s block and an agent sending her out as the world’s least popular beautiful blonde influencer.
Mack is also maid of honor for BFF Carla (Taylor Paige of “Zola” and “Sharp Stick”), but all she can do on their bachelorette weekend in Palm Springs is try to hide how little energy or interest she has for dressing up and clubbing, and how much she envies the seniors having brunch at the pancake house across the street.
The others ditch her at a “past lives regression” therapy tent, where guru Luka (Simon Rex of “Red Rocket,” funny) shoves her in an old tanning bed and tells her “to connect with the person you once were” and envision “who you want to be.”
That’s how she wakes up old, stylish, and hopefully with a hint of what she envies in her elders — not sweating the small stuff because she’s “figured it out.”
After confusing her for “a ghost” Carla calmly accepts this new State of Mack, and squeezes in helping her track down that “regression” shaman to make her 30 again with own her wedding planning.
Sometimes, Carla parks Mack — who passes herself off as “Aunt Rita” — with Carla’s Mom (Devine) and her ladies of a certain age wine club. Those scenes promise comic electricity, with experienced comic actresses letting the zingers zing. And they barely have a pulse.
Does Rita “have a man?”
“The worst thing that can happen is you wind up with herpes. And if you end up in a nursing home, you’re gonna get it anyway!”
Yeah, it’s ALL like that.
Shy Mack finds herself more relaxed and approachable as “Rita,” which is why she sets off sparks with the hunk next door (Milligan).
The producers of “Book Club” engineered this comedy for Keaton, with a couple of TV writers setting their “grow up and get comfortable with who you are” lesson in a “Big” variation.
Early scenes show Paige and others plainly tickled to be sharing scenes with the Oscar winning legend. But the energy flags as the moribund nature of the screenplay sinks in on one and all.
Maybe if “Rita” had been forced into more bachelorette weekend antics with Paige, bubbly Aimee Carrero and Addie Weyrich, the strain of trying to keep up, comically, with Keaton wouldn’t have been so obvious. As it is, “Mack & Rita” is a criminal waste of seasoned comic talent and a criminal misuse of some of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets coming up behind them.
Rating: PG-13 for some drug use, sexual references and profanity.
Cast: Diane Keaton, Taylour Paige, Elizabeth Lail, Loretta Devine, Dustin Milligan, Simon Rex, Amy Hill, Wendy Malick and Lois Smith
Credits: Directed by Katie Aselton, scripted by Madeline Walter and Paul Welsh. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:35
You know what we call a simple, primal, stranded-at-a-great height thriller like “Fall?” Pretty damned good for what it is.
Melodramatic and nerve-wracking, predictable and still jolting, this B-movie directed by Scott Mann (“Heist,””Final Score”) toys with us and plays the viewer like a cheap fiddle. But Mann and two good leads make it sing.
It begins the way every climbing thriller does, the way many a climbing documentary ends — somebody sees somebody else fall to his death. Here, it’s Becky (Grace Caroline Currey), going up a sheer rock wall with husband Dan (Mason Gooding) only to see him hurtle into the abyss below.
A year later, she’s still drinking and grieving, pushing away her pushy Dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who was in “Heist”), still staring at the cardboard package on the counter with “human remains” marked on it.
It takes old pal Hunter (Virginia Gardner) to get her back “out there,” and by “out there” I mean “up there.” Hunter’s an adrenalin junkie who, as “Danger Dee,” has a Youtube channel documenting her fearless climbing feats, and a climbing friend who needs to get back on the horse that threw her.
“Do not let this fear consume you” is her way of goading Becky into joining her on an illegal climb, up “the old B67” transmission tower, out where the buzzards lurk and the Joshua Trees stand guard in the desert. Long out of commission, it’s 2000 feet tall, “the fourth highest in America,” and by God, they’re going up it.
With maintenance ladders going all the way up, this should be a piece of cake “and make GREAT video.” Hunter tends to sex up her climbs with sexed-up death-defying stunts, the last thing Becky needs.
But hey, “I didn’t wear this stupid (push up) bra for nothing!”
The “Danger of Death” signs surrounding the remote TV tower (not a transmission cable left on it) don’t scare them off. What they don’t notice, but simple close-ups show us, are the rusting turnbuckles, loose bolts and buzzards side-eying each other with a look that says “Lunch!”
Mann, who co-wrote the script with Jonathan Frank, sticks to formula. It’s build-up, release, over and over again through an opening series of fakeout frights. And then it’s REAL fright, relax, melodramatic twist, relax again, even BIGGER fright, and so on.
Former child actress Currey (“Ghost Whisperer,” now in the “Shazam!” movies) gives her lungs a workout. We buy into her terror. And she and the brassy Gardner (“Halloween,” “Runaways”) are credible enough climbers and pretty good at selling the scares and the “work the problem” sequences, far fetched as they might be.
But movies like “Fall” are all about the tropes (Foreshadowing, anyone?), the stunts and the editing, all in service of a formula that’s not wholly bulletproof, but close.
And here, enough of that pays off that while we notice how simple it all is, you give the devils their due. It’s still damned good for what it is.
Rating: PG-13, terror, profanity
Cast: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
Credits: Directed by Scott Mann, scripted by Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:47
This looks a bit by Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away” and its crappy American remake.
Shipwrecked, and class conflicts will come to the fore.
“Triangle of Sadness” is from the Swedish director of “Force Majeure” and “The Square.” So funny? Maybe. Dark? Almost certainly.
Oct. 7.
Let’s play a game, shall we?
It wasn’t a terrible idea.
James Ponsoldt, my idea of the quintessential “indie” filmmaker, who makes character-driven dramas such as “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour,” takes a stab at bringing us a girls’ coming of age picture in the “Stand By Me” mold.
In “Summering,” four tweenage girls spend their last weekend before starting middle school finding a body and not telling their parents — event the “helicopter moms” among them — about it. Instead they “investigate” who he was and what happened, and even hold a seance to “contact” him.
So yes, there’s the whiff of Stephen King’s story “The Body” to this, with emotional BFF bonding and the like. But barely a note of this contrived, Nutrasweetened melodrama engages, even on those rare instances in which something rings true.
Daughters or not, having a guy co-write this girls’ story with Ponsoldt shows in every false note.
Daisy (Lia Barnett) is our narrator in this sentimental — set in the present day — tale of suburban 11 year-olds who finish off a giddy suburban summer of somersaulting through sprinklers by stumbling across a man, in a suit, lying beneath an overpass.
Mari (Eden Grace Redfield) wants to phone it in, tell the cops and her mother. But Lola (Sanai Victoria), Daisy and Dina (Madalen Mills) vote her down.
A couple of their moms are “helicopter” qualified, but Mari’s mom (Megan Mullally) is the pilot. Their reasoning? If they tell their mothers, “they’ll think we’re like, traumatized” and go overboard in their concern. It’s “our last weekend” of summer. Who wants to deal with the cops AND their mothers (Sarah Cooper, Ashley Mdadekwe and Lake Bell play the others) for an entire weekend?
In news stories and in the movies, dating back to “River’s Edge” and “Stand By Me,” it’s pretty well established that kids are fully capable of this sort of insensate stupidity.
With narrator Daisy leading the way, they start poking around the body, looking for clues — “What, you’ve never seen ‘C.S.I?” And their last adventure of summer takes them to a bar, a locked school, online and elsewhere in search of who this man was, which will tell them whether he jumped or might have been pushed off that bridge.
The dynamics of the various families are interesting enough — a joking pep talk about “the seventh circle of hell” that middle school is from an older sister, this painter mom or that smothering-mothering mom picking up on “something” being off when their children come home from their trip to “Terabithia” (a tree they’ve decorated with mementoes).
The fathers are mostly invisible here.
The kids hang together but don’t really click, largely because the characters don’t have much in the way of earthy reality about them. Their edges have been rubbed off by the daddy screenwriters. They don’t even cuss, the little angels. And here they are, picking over a body and MOVING the body so nobody else sees it?
I’ve been a Ponsoldt fan since his feature debut, “Off the Black.” He’s made three outstanding films built around alcoholics (“Smashed” and “Spectacular Now” and “Off the Black”), and his winners far outnumber the occasional missteps like “The Circle” or now, “Summering.”
The occasional great line in even this one — about “how August feels, like ‘the good part’ is over” — will have to tide one over until his next movie, hopefully one that’s a lot better than this.
Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material
Cast: Lia Barnett, Sanai Victoria, Madalen Mills, Eden Grace Redfield, Sarah Cooper, Megan Mullally, Ashley Mdadekwe and Lake Bell.
Credits: Directed by James Ponsoldt, scripted by James Ponsoldt and Benjamin Percy. A Bleecker Street release.
Running time: 1:25
An “us” and “them” confrontation between famous chef/staff, and his well-heeled clientele.
A little class war savagery, in the guise of haute cuisine?
Nov 18, from Searchlight Pictures.
A triumph of tone more than anything else, Perry Blackshear’s “When I Consume You” is “The Fisher King” reimagined as a bleak horror tale bathed in abuse and mental illness.
Desperately poor co-dependent siblings struggle to forget their traumatized childhoods and lose themselves in the delusions they live under — that a drug addict and a mental “14 year old” can adopt a child, or become an early childhood educator.
But lurking in the shadows is the green-eyed demon of their past. It’s not just their permanent records and employment histories holding them back. Daphne and Wilson are stalked by a great evil, which each must face in her or his own time.
Writer-director Perry Blackshear revisits the themes and general plot outline of his earlier film “They Look Like People” for this down-market New York story set in the grime, violence and poverty of the city’s underbelly.
Libby Ewing (TV’s “Grow the F*ck Up”) is Daphne, barely holding it together, fielding unannounced three a.m. visits from her panic-attack prone “on the spectrum” brother Wilson (Evan Dumouchel, of “They Look Like People”) and patiently meeting with an adoption counselor, as if a “recovering” addict with a police record has a prayer of that ever happening.
All her self-help/self-actualization “Buddhist” “Zen” etc. jargon can’t hide the obvious. She’s too damaged, too needy and too broke to offer anything to a child.
Wilson, a college drop-out janitor, figures he’ll become a teacher to “help kids” and “make them feel safe.” Well, maybe in Florida. There’s quite the governor-generated shortage here, you know.
Daphne is great at calming her brother, propping him up and understanding him. Imagine his and the viewer’s shock when he walks in on her, OD’d in her bed, her blow-dryer still running.
The “14 year old boy” that Wilson is, he flees, trying to outrun this shock and his own lungs in a breathless (handheld camera) sprint. When he catches his breath and comes back, he first assumes he can revive the dead sister, then he calls the cops and insists he saw “a man” fleeing through her no-fire-escape fourth-floor window.
It’s only when Daphne comes back to him that his task becomes clear. He will find “the murderer,” and “become someone who can fight the man who killed you.”
To the ghost of Daphne, and to us, it’s pretty obvious that was no “man.” And as she exhorts Wilson and “trains” him for the big confrontation, we wonder just who or what Wilson will track down and how he might face it.
Blackshear’s preferred vibe here is down and out and fatalistic. Doom and gloom hang over this story and this quest, and Daphne’s spirit does not sugarcoat it for the brother she’s no longer there to protect.
The sibling relationship and intimate details of their lives — he keeps plants that he names after “Lord of the Rings” or “Hunger Games” characters — are major selling points of this downbeat story.
The supernatural nature of the quest make it “horror.” But “When I Consume You” is closer to being an arm’s-length character study in illness, an arrested-mental-development take on what a childish brother believes he’s seen and the “evil” he must confront.
For all its brevity, packaging a simple psychological horror story in a relatively short film, I felt my interest drifting away in the internalized struggle and contrived, externalized confrontation of the later acts.
It’s still an intriguing and somewhat cerebral entry in the horror canon, a movie that reminds us that the real “monsters” are trauma and the real confrontations are best handled in a therapist’s office.
Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Libby Ewing, Evan Dumouchel, MacLeod Andrews.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Perry Blackshear. A 1091 release.
Running time: 1:29
A good puzzle thriller entertains with the story it’s telling, and the other directions you figure the story just might go, if only in your mind.
“Rogue Agent” begins in late IRA bombing campaign era Britain, with its intrigues and espionage and pieces of spycraft delivered by our voice-over narrator. But where that story — about “keeping an eye on” suspected terrorists at a British college — goes “nine years later” in the early 2000s, is a cat and mouse tale with cruel and tragic undertones.
It’s a film that keeps a lot of possibile outcomes afloat, any one of which is as plausible as the one that’s “the true story.”
Reviewing the film, written and directed by veterans of British “true crime” series and the upcoming Peacock cyber-combat series “The Undeclared War,” presents a critic with a minefield of potential “spoilers.” But let’s see how many I can avoid as I heartily recommend it.
It’s a Gemma Arterton vehicle, as hers is the voice of the all-knowing narrator we hear in the opening scenes. She lets us know “tricks that spies use” about “how to read a room” and how to make “a connection” with someone just by looking “into their eyes long enough to register their eye color.”
We see a fellow, played by James Norton, take a barman (bartender) job at a pub near a college to “recruit” students to be field agents for his operation. One (Marisa Abela) is reluctant, but soon Sophie and her two classmates (Freya Mavor, Rob Malone) are observing, tricking and even searching the rooms of people “Rob” identifies as under suspicion.
Risky work, seeing as how the Irish Republican Army treated spies. Then Rob rounds them all up in the dead of night with a “You’ve been COMPROMISED” and whisks them away.
“Nine years later,” a London litigation lawyer (Arterton) attracts the attention of a somewhat slick luxury car salesman (Norton), someone she dismisses with extreme prejudice, but someone she returns to apologize to.
And for the first time in this smart, twisty tale, we wonder who’s playing whom and just what all this is about. Because the love affair that ensues is only somewhat credible, with his intriguing intensity and odd blend of gaucherie and charm and her a woman of class and intelligence and her firm’s private investigator (Julian Barratt) on retainer.
But all is not what it seems, and the more she and we learn, the prospects of what this attorney might do to trip up, evade or unite with this “rogue agent” seem to grow in number rather than shrink to just a few choices.
Norton — he had the title role in the very fine “Mr. Jones” — evinces an oily charm here that puts us on our guard, and we’d assume our attorney on hers. I’d say that’s a logically lacking element to the film, the hardest sell among many hard sells folded into it.
But the always beguiling Arterton is quite good at suggesting a focused but perhaps lonely professional woman disarmed by this confident, handsome guy’s excuses, evasions and deflections, maybe even charmed by them. Rob might see red flags in her mistrust and suspicion. But as Alice the attorney doesn’t spot them at every turn, she’s putting a lot more romantic stock in the offbeat magic of having someone introduce you to “the thousand year song” of echoing Tibetan music bowls than one would expect.
“Rogue Agent” presents some things that truly stretch credulity as simple facts, leaving the viewer to slap our head in wonder because, damned if this story isn’t “true.” You can look it up, although that’s not recommended until after you’ve seen it.
Because as this clever script winds its way towards a finale that’s not really a conclusion, you’d be cheating yourself of the fun of the mystery-thriller you’re watching, and the one you’re frantically writing in your head as possibility after possibility pops up, is wrestled with and discarded to make way for the next.
Rating: unrated, sex, smoking, profanity
Cast: Gemma Arterton, James Norton, Marisa Abela, Sarah Goldberg, Freya Mavor, Rob Malone and
Shazad Latif.
Credits: Directed by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, scripted by Michael Bonner, Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:54
Every long form “embedded” sports documentary is an incredible leap of faith.
Think of “Hoop Dreams,” where you go in, invest years covering and getting close to a small group of players, clinging to the hope that at least one of them will become a star in the NBA — eventually.
A filmmaker sees a narrative going in, a classic underdog story. But the reason so many of us love sports is the knowledge that you never know how things are going to turn out. Hard to plan “heartwarming” when a rattle off the rim, “a ground ball with eyes” or a tipped pass can upend your “Hollywood Ending.”
“Hockeyland” is a polished, intimate and somewhat generic look at lives on and off the ice in the Motherland of American hockey, northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. It sets up as an underdog story — the dying town clinging to its glorious hockey past, a high school revival, a storied program’s first playoff run in 18 years. But as any hockey fan’ll tell you, it’s a fast-paced, brutal and fickle game. You can have a star or stars bound for the NHL, working class kids “maturing” and seeking redemption, or playing through debilitating back pain, a tragic backstory or two off the ice. None of that matters if run into that red hot goalie who guards the net like his firstborn.
“Saving Brinton” director Tommy Haines, a Midwesterner, knows the lay of the land and gives us a sometimes graceful, occasionally bone-jarring film that vividly captures action on the ice — trash talk and brawls include — and far more banal lives off of it.
He contrasts modern Minnesota high school hockey power Hermantown with fading, once-lauded Eveleth, once so storied it became home of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. More populous Hermantown had become “the big bad bullies” of Minnesota high school hockey. Eveleth’s a dying town on the Iron Range, its high school reduced to merging with neighboring Gilbert and destined — before the film was finished — to be absorbed by the larger school in nearby Virginia, Minnesota.Hermantown’s coach preaches “mindfulness” and meditation in addition to his usual exhortations. Eveleth’s is Mr. Old School “Go out there kick their asses.”
Hermantown had a bound for glory star in Blake Biondi, a very good team — including brothers Indio Dowd and Ardyn Dowd — around him and a winning culture thanks to its all-involved coaching staff.
In 2019-20 Eveleth fielded a team with 15 seniors. But star Elliot Van Orsdel is a reckless sort who “gets into trouble” in between hockey seasons, everybody says. A senior not deemed fit to be “captain” material, his redemption story is winning back that trust and restoring a fading town’s reputation as capital of Hockeyland.
Haines is a good enough filmmaker to get a decent movie out of this rivalry and these characters when things aren’t likely to give him a storybook finale. We pick up on that early on, with the army of talent making relentless Hermantown seem unstoppable. Still, there’s that “one hot goalie” hope, hanging around as we see games over the course of the season, every storyline pointing to the state playoffs, “Mr. Hockey” voting and hockey hopes post-graduation.
The brutal action on the ice might not deliver lump-in-the-throat moments. But the backstories — this kid lost a mentoring father to cancer, that one has a mother fighting the deadly disease, a scoliosis diagnosis here, pro scout visits there — give the movie a dab of heart.
If it wasn’t for the “Slap Shot” trash talk on the ice, “Hockeyland” would feel positively quaint, a Minnesota of Garrison Keillor’s imagination — wholesome kids hanging with grandad, (some) religious families, a PG-dating scene and recklessness limited to skidding your SUV off the road in the snow. High school kids being the way they are, and with the obviously blue collar nature of Eveleth’s stars and their families, I wondered what the kids weren’t letting Haines see.
And despite Haines’ best efforts, the film’s shift in focus once its original narrative breaks down is jarring. All of a sudden, golden boy Blake is the focus when he’s barely in the early acts. Haines set up expectations when he shows us the “It’s Eveleth” disdain in the Hermantown locker room, a “pride goeth before the fall” trope, one neither the underdogs nor the movie about them can deliver.
But the slice of life stuff — busting up lumber scraps for firewood at one of those ever-unfinished Minnesota working class houses, bowling night, post-game parties — is somewhat immersive and paints a portrait of one place where the kids want to escape and another that’s found meaning and attention and self-worth thanks to hard work, discipline and not running into that “one hot goalie” all that often.
Rating: unrated, hockey violence, profanity
Cast: Elliot Van Orsdel, Indio Dowd, Lori Dowd, Blake Biondi, Jeff Torrel, Pat Andrews, Jessica Van Orsdel
Credits: Directed by Tommy Haines, scripted by J.T. Haines, Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne.
A Greenwich Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:47
Movie Nation 