Gender bending, reinventing, never dominating music because he was much more about being ahead of the curve, of course he lured one of the great music documentary filmmakers to take on his story.
Even beyond the grave the David Bowie magnetism remains irresistible.
Sept. 16
There’s a strange, sweet and magical film straining to break free of the pokey storytelling of “Habaddi,” an Indian children’s fantasy set in Western India, where Marathi is spoken and Kabaddi is the sport of choice.
Director Nachiket Samant manages some beautiful if not entirely vital to the story moments in this meandering movie about a stuttering child who takes up a difficult sport — especially for stutterers — so that he can track down his first crush in distant Mumbai.
In the contact team sport of Kabaddi, which has a hint of the Western children’s game “Red Rover” about it, a “raider” dashes in to tag opposing players and (I gather) avoid being tackled by them. While he’s doing that, he chants the not-quite-tongue-twisting name of the game to them.
“Kabaddi Kabaddi Kabaddi Kabaddi.”
Hard enough, yes? Now try doing it with a stutter.
Manya is a bullied orphan boy of ten who often skips school and hides from the peers he should be playing with because everybody — mean kids and tactless adults — teases him about his stutter. He rarely speaks, communicating with gestures mostly.
But the lovely tween Ketaki (Vedshree Mahajan) enchants him with her spirit and bravery. She’s showing off her favorite music box, a ballerina who twirls to the tune of Beethoven’s solo piano piece “Fur Elise,” when a bully knocks it into the “haunted” well where the “Naked Ghost” dwells.
That’s the one place they’ve have been warned not to play, so naturally it’s catnip to the kiddies. And now Ketaki’s beloved music box has sunk to the bottom of it.
Manya barely gives a moment’s thought to diving in to try and fetch it. He fails, but he doesn’t give up. Being a tiny tinkerer, we see this engineering savant take apart clocks and put them back together. It’s nothing for him to swipe a pair of glasses, the barber’s scissors and the bike repairman’s inner tube to conjure up goggles to aid his quest.
Kerati moves away to Mumbai, but Manya can’t get her off his mind. It’s not until the village’s most celebrated Kabaddi player, Murati (Mayur Khandge) returns and is coerced into coaching the local kids in the sport that Manya sees a way to fulfill his quest. He’s been trying to sneak off and take the bus to Mumbai without the money to do it. But a Kabaddi team will get to travel there, if he joins it and if they get good enough.
There’s lovely underwater footage of the child diving into the aquarium clear (with turtles and blue tangs) well. The superstitious locals pray for the forgiveness of the Naked Ghost which they say dwells there.
We also see one of Manya’s adult protectors talking with him via a ventriloquist dummy, which might be a way to help the boy cope with his stutter.
But here’s the thing, director and co-writer Nachiket Samant. We don’t actually see the lad fetch the music box. The ghost, like the ventriloquist’s dummy, like the kid’s beloved donkey whom Ketaki gives a name, like his time-lapse tinkering with clocks (taken apart and re-assembled) are all non-starters.
Samant throws all this unresolved material into the movie as an excuse for taking forever to get to the game that gives the film its title and the quest that gives mop-topped Manya his purpose.
The third act just bounces along as the kid masters the game by learning a way to say the magic word over and over again while playing it, with music — much of it inspired by “Fur Elise” — singing and bouncing along with them. He meets a fellow stutterer or two, his coach’s “secret shame” is addressed and they travel to Mumbai.
But getting to Mumbai, allegedly the focus of his quest, becomes an anti-climax. I’d say “Someone took his eye off the ball,” but there’s no ball in “Kabaddi Kabaddi Kabaddi.” And no matter how much you love “Fur Elise,” hearing that “Kabiddi” phrase sung incessantly to that Beethoven tune is sure to get on your nerves.
Not as much as the scatterbrained holes in the “Hadabbi” plot. What’s Manya got to take to Ketaki if he doesn’t fetch the music box? His impish smile and unruly haircut? I went back to rewatch that part of the story to make sure my eyes hadn’t tricked me. Was that chopped out of the US version? Why introduce X, Y and Z if these characters and story decor don’t advance the plot?
That’s why I say there’s a cute movie in this, and somebody lost the thread getting to it.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Karan Dave, Mayur Khandge, Vedshree Mahajan
Credits: Directed by Nachiket Samant, scripted by Yogesh Vinayak Joshi and Nachiket Samant. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:43
I reviewed this German coming-of-age import back in June, and the fact that June is “Pride Month” should tell you this one is about a teen discovering her sexuality, and that it’s not necessarily binary.
Writer-director Leonie Krippendorff’s drama is more poignant than titillating or eye-opening, just a very well done and “universal” story of puberty and coping with it.
I’m guessing Maitland’s ancient and esteemed public library and its liberal populace would love to see it. Thanks to Film Movement for providing the DVD.
MovieNation, the cinema’s Johnny Appleseed, spreading fine films far and wide one film, one public library at a time.
I’m into this Filipino American slice of life corner of comedy. Not the first film I’ve reviewed in this vein, but this looks cheerful and cute and cutting.
Opens Friday. Tiffany H is here, of course.
A September mockumentary treatment of corrupt megachurch ministering from siblings who bill themselves as The Ebo Brothers.
Looks mean and hilarious.
Sometimes you have to wonder if an actor’s gotten too good at playing “unlikable.”
B.J. Novak, a sometime actor who scripted his way onto the screen in “The Office” and thus had some control over the image he wanted his character to convey, might be the case in point. And he tops that faithless, backstabbing “Office” Romeo bro with “Vengeance,” his feature film writing and directing debut.
It’s a movie about the clashing values of America’s “culture wars” and a send up of the most narcissistic, fame-craving generation ever. And in Ben Manalowitz, Novak tries to create a Sammy Glick for our times — a New York “type” flattering himself as fit to pass judgement on other American “types” by dint of his New Yorker Magazine staff writing gig and his amoral, avaricious ambition.
Ben wants his own podcast, because that’s the way connected New York media folks create “intellectual property” and parlay their “stories” into streaming TV series, movies, fame and wealth.
We meet Ben, scrolling through his phone, thoughtlessly chatting up one of his “bros” about women, hook-ups, avoiding “commitment” and the like.
“I only date ONLY children…or the oldest of three” kids in a family is his ethos. “100 percent” is his vocalized crutch, his way of affirming anything anybody is telling him. He’s shallow and if not instantly repellent, at least he’s someone most people would be wary of.
He’s been peppering a public radio podcast producer (the wonderful Issae Rae of “Insecure” and “The Lovebirds”) with vague pitches for “America” in this moment podcast ideas, leaning on what he arrogantly perceives as his great gift to journalism or “writing,” as he pretentiously insists on calling his profession.
He can “find this person, or that generalized cultural force.” He studies it and writes about it. “I will define it!”
But it takes a wee hours phone call from BFE Texas to give him a pitch with a hook.
“Your girlfriend’s dead!” Wait, what? He’s in bed, asleep with one of his regular hook-ups, forced to instantly process who “Abby,” who “told us so much about you” was. He expresses sympathy, researches the name on his phone contacts, deflects when Abby’s sobbing brother Ty speaks of the funeral this coming Saturday.
“I’ll be with you in spirit,” is heard as “Spirit Airlines.” But Ben is just awake enough to smell a “story,” about shallow connections, “relationships” that aren’t — not really. He agrees to come, pitches his podcast producer and hops on a plane.
It’s only when he gets off that he meets Abby “Abilene” Shaw’s brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook, terrific) that he learns what the family has in mind. “Vengeance.” Ben can help Ty find out “who did this to Abby,” unravel the “conspiracy” behind what the cops wrote off as an “accidental overdose.”
“She wouldn’t touch so much as an ADVIL!”
Ben’s best instincts — “I don’t avenge deaths…I don’t live in a Liam Neeson movie!” — are overwhelmed by what a great podcast this will make, a story of guns, family, drugs and Red State America’s mania for vast conspiracies to explain anything they choose not to accept as fact.
He’ll have to ignore Ty’s least favorite Liam Neeson movie, “the one with the trains” (“Schindler’s List”). He’ll have to let slide “You look like a LOTTA guys in that movie” if he wants to “fit in” and get these folks to open up to the digital recorder his producer Fed Ex’s him for “Dead White Girl,” as he plans on calling this series.
It’ll be Ben’s way of exacting “vengeance,” exposing the wide world to what they know, what they find out and maybe even who they ID as “suspects.” As Ty helpfully notes, maybe a motivated listener will “kill’em for us,” after hearing this podcast.
The West Texas setting allows Novak to poke at rodeos, honky tonk line-dancing, Whattaburger, “Frito Pie,” West Texas college football allegiances and the indifferent, dim-witted, kick-to-another “jurisdiction” nature of small town Texas policing. He learns about the drug problem, senses the isolation and resentment of “big city” values and hears the parade of assorted “energy” companies listed as “sponsors” of the rodeo, and he gets it.
Ben interviews cops, a suspected drug “kingpin,” and others. He listens to Abby’s music — she was an aspiring singer-songwriter who could never get him to check out her work — and meets her stereotype-embracing and upending small town record producer, Quentin (Ashton Kutcher).
Maybe as Ben listens to this Quentin fellow he’s taken aback by an upbeat, encouraging and sage recording engineer, coach, cheerleader and philosopher. Quentin is a lot of things Ben most certainly is not — “deep” for starters.
“Nobody writes anything,” Quentin explains. “We just translate.”
And as he’s processing all this and learning all about this “random” hook-up he never got to know, Ben forms an opinion of what’s going on and then abandons it, forms a new opinion and then forms one about himself. He’s soul-searching, examining his own “hollowness” next to these people who ask him “You have family in Texas?” and then tell him “You do, now.”
Before he’s done, Ben might even regret accepting the insistence by the cowboy-hatted preacher and Abby’s family that he “say a few words” at the funeral of a woman he did not know. Most folks he meets make him question every preconceived notion he had about a place he was so ignorant of — “I didn’t know Texans lost at The Alamo.” Not every prejudice is abandoned. Not after meeting rabid Texas Tech football fans, for instance.
Dove Cameron, Eli Bickel and Isabella Amara play the late Abby’s other siblings, J. Smith-Cameron is her earthy, grieving mother, Louanne Stephens is her earthier, gun-nutty (like everybody else) granny. And in music performance clips Ben is seeing for the first time, Lio Tipton brings a sweet, tuneful pathos to Abby, who was plainly more than Ben gave her credit for being.
There are good scenes where Rae’s producer coaches Ben on radio and how to get “good sound” — not talking over people’s answers, affecting a “silent laugh” to encourage an interviewee to open up and expand on something. A sly commentary that exposes big city prejudices is her urging him to “stay safe” and “get the story,” and his acting as if “not in that order” is called for because this unfamiliar place where a girl died is inherently more dangerous than New York.
The podcast, with Ben trying out monologues and introductions in that “This American Life” self-conscious purple prose, is damned convincing. Novak makes the quintessential public radio “storyteller,” reminding us that there’s a reason NPR’s nickname is “B’nai Brith Broadcasting” and that podcasts are not just “for people who couldn’t master radio.” All it takes is being born into the Northeastern “elites,” listening to a few hours of NPR’s affected “storytellers,” the performative nature of their questioning, answering and narrating (We hear “Fresh Air” hostess Terry Gross, here and there.), mimicking the right curious, sympathetic but aloof tone, and bingo — you’re a star…of podcasting.
But “Vengeance” is not a movie to warm to, to embrace or even allow yourself a wholehearted buy-in. Novak keeps characters at arm’s length, forgets about the “mystery” at its heart only to abruptly take it up in the third act and goes all squishy about the various people his script is judging — Ben, the Shaws, the assorted “types.”
“Vengeance” lets you appreciate its ambition and wince at its obvious overreach.
Holbrook is the standout slice of “reality” in the cast — drawling, easily underestimated, impulsive, sure of what he knows and what he wants to do, convinced he can talk this New Yorker into joining him on his quest (which the script doesn’t show Tyactually “investigating” himself).
Kutcher tries his hand at playing cryptic, quiet and thoughtful and almost gets there.
Novak, portraying a mostly-blank-expressioned cypher, gives us nothing to hold onto and little suggestion of an interior life, much less the moral compass his character is supposed to discover.
Novak may like writing and playing “unlikeable” characters, but there’s more to it than just making their goals selfish and their worldview self-centered. He’s happy being the villainous hero or heroic villain in his own story, but he’s damned bland at it. That makes this “hero’s journey” to “defining” divided America murkier, still interesting but not particularly compelling.
Rating: R for language and brief violence
Cast: B.J. Novak, Issa Rae, Boyd Holbrook, Dove Cameron, Lio Tipton, Zach Villa, Isabella Amara and Ashton Kutcher.
Credits: Scripted and directed by B.J. Novak. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:47
Brad Pitt makes a riotous return to action comedy on board “Bullet Train,” a Japanese hitman-among-hitmen thriller of the “Mass Murder on the Orient Express” variety.
Stuntman (“John Wick”) turned “Deadpool 2/Hobbes and Show” director David Leitch puts Pitt through his punchout paces in a laugh-out-loud melee that’s “Seven Psychopaths,” “Pulp Fiction/Hateful Eight” and “Free Fire” — pretty much any movie about murderers murdering murderers — rolled into one.
It’s got set-piece brawls and star cameos, a “MacGuffin” and old grudges and characters named The Wolf, The Hornet, White Death and The Elder, with one nicknamed “Ladybug,” for “luck.”
Based on a novel by Kôtarô Isaka, it’s pure popcorn, a wildly illogical, nonsensical zip through cultures clashing and knives slashing with assorted killers running afoul of each other — but not “civilians” among the passengers, rarely the crew and never the police.
Pitt plays a “snatch and grab” specialist hired to swipe this briefcase on a long, fast train ride. Simple, right? The Nippon Speedline makes stops, but they’re precisely timed at one minute each. “Snatch” the case, pop off at the next available stop and nobody’s the wiser.
His com-linked “handler” has codenamed him “Ladybug,” and is puzzled why he’s passed on taking along the pistol she left for him, because “some conflicts require a gun.”
Not our “Ladybug,” who is in therapy and “experiencing a calm like never, ever before…You put peace into the world, you get peace back.”
Sure.
But grabbing that briefcase puts “The (British) Twins” (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron-Taylor Johnson) on his trail. “Not really sure they’re ‘twins.'”
He runs into a Mexican murderer (Bad Bunny), who instantly pulls a knife and tries to end him.
There’s “The Prince” (Joey King), who may look and sound like a British school girl, but isn’t. She’s lured a father (Andrew Koji) whose little boy she shoved off a hotel roof. But she doesn’t know the father’s knife-scarred old man (Hiroyuki Sanada) is shadowing them.
And behind the scenes, some Russian born Japanese crime lord named White Death is calling for growled updates and pulling strings to get his son (Logan Lerman) off that train, and the ransom money he’s paid for him returned in full.
Our Ladybug is trapped in a “John Wick” world where everybody’s a killer, many of whom he’s crossed paths with (“Johannesburg,” “Bolivia,” “Mexico”), in constant touch with his handler/confessor (“Grosse Pointe Blank”) and forever sharing what his therapist “Barry” has taught him about a new way to look at the world.
“Let this be a lesson on the toxicity of anger!”
Leitch and screenwriter Zak Olkewicz (“Fear Street: Part Two” on Netflix) play around with the clash of cultures. One car on this train in “Hello Kitty” obsessed Japan has kitty themed seats and even a plush mascot.
One killer learned how to judge character and face the world via “Thomas the Tank Engine.” No, you don’t want to be the “Diesel” on board this fast train. Not in his eyes.
It’s all knives and samurai swords and booby-trapped pistols and never-for-one-minute logical. A team of minions get on the roof at one stop. Why? To be killed off, of course.
Everybody takes a beating/cutting/shooting, with character after character settling onto the train with barely-discrete blood stains on their fine threads, many hurled off it or out of it later en route or at the next scheduled stop, all of them hellbent on getting back on and finishing what they started.
Pitt’s Ladybug? He’s as innocuous as an “I could live here” tourist. In thick glasses and a floppy hat, he could pass for Woody Allen with a Johnny Depp aversion to ever getting a haircut again.
The cameos and third act actor introductions turn this into an all-star romp — of sorts — further lightening the tone.
Like “Wick” and “Deadpool,” it all gets to be a bit much. The pace and energy eases up for assorted flashbacks. The best gags are running gags, the funniest lines the ones repeated — about a Black Briton and White Briton who are nobody’s idea of “twins,” about where Ladybug’s head space is, about everything “Thomas the Tank Engine” has to teach us about life.
In a summer where all the action has had its lighter touches, “Bullet Train” rolls in just in time for Pitt and Pals (in some cases, literally) to bookend the cinema season with a fine and furious companion piece to “The Lost City,” which opened festivities and invited audiences back into theaters in April.
It’s a new-fangled, old-fashioned E-ticket ride of a movie and an amusing exclamation point to put on the year that brought filmgoers back to theaters for the magic — and mayhem — of the movies.
Rating: R for strong and bloody violence, pervasive language, and brief sexuality.
Cast: Brad Pitt, Joey King, Brian Tyree Henry, Hiroyuki Sanada, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bad Bunny, Zazie Beetz and Sandra Bullock.
Credits: Directed by David Leitch, scripted by Zak Olkewicz, based on a novel by Kôtarô Isaka. A Sony/Columbia release.
Running time: 2:06
A hint of Meghan and Harry in this August 26;release. Wot wot?
“Sharp Stick, the second feature film from writer, director and TV series creator (or adapter) Lena Dunham, takes her back to her era-encapsulating TV series “Girls.” It’s a movie about media and modern sexuality, the gig economy, family and a “community,” and the mores in this insular world she creates.
It’s kind of slapdash and all over the place — again, like “Girls” — introducing interesting characters and losing track of them, focusing on the most sexually promiscuous/adventurous young woman in the lot. It doesn’t really hold together or earn its “My point, and I do have one” scene.
But it’s of its moment if for no other reason than it presents the first “abortion (baby) shower” the cinema has every produced. Yeah, Ms. Millennial knows how to get attention and throw a little shock in with her branded version of sexual adventurism.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is the five-times-married landlady of a dumpy apartment complex, a mother of two and a high-mileage LA libertine who wears her appearance in “two Duran Duran videos” like a badge of honor.
Bombshell daughter Treina (Taylour Paige of “Lola”) is an on-the-make Instagram personality, a young woman who poses for attention and income, one given to “crushes” that lock her in “d–k prison” to this or that man, much to her mother’s disapproval.
“There’s always another one,” has been the message of Mom’s life, Treina tells her sister Sarah Jo (Kristine Forseth of “The Assistant” and TV’s “Looking for Alaska”). It’s how Treina “gets over” each man who lets her down.
Sarah Jo could use the advice, because this special needs caregiver is 26 and the opposite of every other woman in her family. Sarah Jo is a virgin, naive to the point of “on the spectrum,” and discovering lust…for the father of a boy with Downs she babysits each day.
Josh (Jon Bernthal) is very married because wife Heather (Dunham) is very pregnant. But she’s the breadwinner, a real estate agent. He’s the upbeat, childish, would-be rapper and 40ish house-husband not-quite-caregiver to their son, who has Sarah Jo around during the day, after all.
Inexperienced Sarah Jo decides she wants experience, and Josh is the man to provide it. And after paying some lip service to “I can’t,” he can. An affair begins, an introduction to porn follows, and Sarah Jo is off on her own version of Aubrey Plaza’s “The To Do List.” Sarah wants to experience everything the sexual world has to offer, stuff she knows thanks to her crush on a porn star whose work Josh has introduced her to.
Dunham lets this rhymes-with-bucket “list” take over her slight, episodic and frankly dull little movie. And aside from lovely, sweet and amusing work from Scott Speedman — as porn star Vance — there’s not much to recommend it.
Sarah Jo doesn’t “grow” or “learn” much other than how empty this pursuit and her following her mother in it is. Mom, given a decent “your origin stories” scene (explicit, crude accounts of how each daughter came to be), all but dies of neglect. And even her character is better off than what happens to Treina.
The “power of ritual” scene, that party for a baby that a pregnant daughter has elected to “not complete,” decorated and documented for Instagram, says more about “casual” clumsiness and the complete abandonment of privacy than “choice.” It might have been Dunham’s Big Statement in her latest Millennials in their Moment movie, if only she’d had one to make.
Running time: R for strong sexual content, some nudity, language throughout and drug use.
Cast: Kristine Forseth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Taylour Paige, Jon Bernthal, Scott Speedman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Lena Dunham
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lena Dunham. A FilmNation release.
Running time: 1:36
For a pretty long stretch from the mid-80s into the very early 2000s, animator Will Vinton‘s work was everywhere. The clay-animated California Raisins TV commercials made him a household name. Domino’s Pizzas were menaced by his character, The Noid. He invented the term “Claymation,” and copyrighted it, even though it became short-hand for stop-motion Plasticine-animation. At his peak, his animation house had two series on the air in 2000.
Remember Eddie Murphy’s “The PJs?”
As the new documentary “Claydreams” reminds us, Vinton had that “Be the new Walt Disney” dream, and he never let go of it. He’d won an Oscar for a short film — “Closed Mondays” — he co-directed in 1974. He wanted to make feature films. He wanted to create a character that he would own, “that would make an amusement park.” It never happened, and the studio he founded didn’t reach its artistic peak until it was taken from him.
Writer-director Marq Evans’ “Claydream” treats this piece of Portlandia lore — Vinton was a native Oregonian who kept his business there and wanted his planned theme park built there — as a tragedy, a Preston Tucker style visionary stymied and stopped just short of glory.
But it’s apparent that even Evans had to see this “character,” as one former colleague says, had more than one “character flaw” that just wouldn’t let it happen.
Vinton started plans for a “Frog Prince” movie, but Disney got there first. Vinton popularized “Claymation,” but Aardman (“Wallace & Gromit,” “Chicken Run”) did it better, even if he wouldn’t let them use that term to describe the work. He won an a Emmy for a “California Raisins” holiday special, which says more about the Emmys following fads than it does about the work.
The director who mostly had to content himself with shorts and filming other people’s commercials and TV ideas got to make one feature film. And the ungainly, atonal “Adventures of Mark Twain” (1985) showed “story,” “script” and characters to not be his strong suits.
As someone who cultivated a Disney-esque sense of “credit,” he never recruited talented writers to collaborate and share the glory with. Even after he took his studio into CGI — pioneering the talking M&Ms commercials — he lacked the vision, team-building skills and storyeller’s eye that allowed Pixar to revolutionize the medium with “Toy Story.”
“Claydream” has interviews with collaborators, Vinton Studios alumni, fellow animators like Bill Plympton and animation historian Jerry Beck. It features clips of decades of behind-the-scenes home movies and TV feature stories — some national, but the vast majority from local media right there in Portland, which emphasize both his hometown loyalty and the pejorative label “small time.”
Sure, Vinton did a Raisins spot with Michael Jackson, a big fan (and a guy who knew a good fad to latch onto when he saw it). But his films never had the wit and warmth of Aardman scripts, and never had the sophisticated cachet that got the attention of big name actors or the most colorful voice actors.
That suits the documentary’s framing device, a court deposition for an early 2000s lawsuit between Vinton and Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight. That suit, played out in clips throughout “Claydream,” was between a silent but big name investor who moved to take the company over when Vinton’s missteps put it in the red.
Vinton had already blown the chance to team up with Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs, didn’t own the rights to those damned raisins and never developed anything that became a great commercial success on his own. Not going along with Knight turned out to be his biggest blunder of all.
Knight and his son turned Vinton’s once-successful clay animation house into stop-motion trend setters Laika (“Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” “Missing Link”), which has proven to be a worthy competitor to both Aardman and even Pixar, at least in an artistic sense.
“Claydream” ensures that we at least remember the guy who popularized an art form that predated him — “Gumby,” “Davey & Goliath” were TV mainstays in the ’50s and ’60s — and that peaked after he was shoved aside by the better storytellers who came along to take it over.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Will Vinton, Susan Shadburne, Bill Plympton, Jerry Beck, William Fiesterman and Phil Knight
Credits: Scripted and directed by Marq Evans. An Oscilloscope Labs release.
Running time: 1:36
Movie Nation 