Tiffany Haddish and Tia Carrere also star in this Koy-engineered August release. They say Lou Diamond Phillips is also in it.
Not getting a “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” indie/working class and funny vibe from this.
More upscale and contrived, as in seriously studio processed — but there are a couple of chuckles in this trailer — OK, one, the Manny Pacquiao joke.
August 3, we’ll know if they’re saving the best laughs for the paying audience.
Hollywood’s long affair with James A. Michener, the World War II Navy veteran whose “Tales of the South Pacific” launched a Pulitzer-prize winning literary career, began with a sort of proof-of-concept film.
Long before the musical “South Pacific,” United Artists, Gary Cooper, director Mark Robson and a Technicolor film crew decamped to Upolu, Samoa, for a sentimental saga of sin, race and religious fascism set just before and during World War II on a “paradise” that had been spoiled by dictatorial Christian missionaries.
“Return to Paradise” may raise eyebrows today for casting the 50something Cooper as a drifter who washes up on an island where the stereotypical simple happy natives are under the thumb of a martinet of a second generation missionary (Barry Jones). Yes, the star was a bit old to be playing this sort of beach bum/vagabond, and pairing him up with a native girl (Roberta Haynes) half his age has a cringey quality.
But the film, taken from one of the “Return to Paradise” stories of the author of “Tales of the South Pacific,” and later “Hawaii,” packs a lot of code-challenging and societal mores-testing into its 100 or so minutes.
Natives returning to their pre-missionary social norms of skinny dipping and premarital sex, the drifter fathering a child out of wedlock, conservative church authority ridiculed for the Return to Puritanism that it was could be pretty racy stuff pre-“Peyton Place,” and feels closer in tone to pre-code films such as the notorious and oft-adapted “Rain.”
Film buffs may recall that that the race to deflower a virgin “romance” “The Moon is Blue” also came out in 1953, so the stodgy ’50s of lore had more of a blush to them than is commonly accepted.
A young adult schoolteacher (Hans Kruse) narrates the story, his memories of growing up in the early 1930s on Matareva, “an island in chains.”
The autocratic missionary Corbett took over running the church and the island when his father died. Whatever benevolence the original Christian immigrants, his parents, might have displayed has been replaced by a man who figures mandatory church services, curfews, clothing and moral codes are the quickest way to salvation, order and progress.
Which is why he enforces these with club-carrying goons he’s deputized to ensure everybody shows up for his prim fire-and-brimstone sermons.
Morgan (Cooper) is dropped off after hitching a lift from sailors who rescued him from another vessel that foundered. His laconic “I figured I’d try it for a while” view of staying is instantly challenged by Corbett, who is tone-deaf to the hypocrisy of his “White men are not welcome on this island” outrage. “They corrupt their (the natives) morals!”
Morgan isn’t having it, and brushes off the endless provocations of this “two bit Mussolini” and commences to pick a spot to slap up a hut. Just enough of the islanders sympathize with him, and recognize the needed challenge to Christo-fascism that he represents, to back him up.
When Morgan is attacked, the towering American fights back. He hasn’t hoboed for decades without learning how to throw a punch.
And thus the war of wills is joined, and the rebellious island girl Maeva (Haynes, actually 25 when this was filmed) is smitten.
The story’s parameters are set, with only Morgan’s itchy refusal to commit — to the island, long term, to Maeva, even though he sticks around after getting her pregnant — with only the clumsily-inserted coming war to replace the conflict that really drives the piece, the “infidel” Morgan vs. Corbett and his goons.
There’s a pleasant but trite change-of-heart when Morgan returns to the island years later, during World War II, and finds himself trying to protect the virtue of his daughter (Moira Walker) from on-the-make servicemen who can’t help but remind him of himself.
Even a writer as enlightened for his times as Michener couldn’t avoid bits of “white man’s burden” in his story, “Mr. Morgan,” and the movie make no bones about this. The natives have “lost our strength,” and only the manly Morgan can bring back its memory. There’s a patronizing “Lord Jim” in this Kipling-esque view of the white savior helping those simple, happy natives.
But the film’s early acts, with its conflict between totalitarian moral authority and “an infidel,” still play and pop off the screen. Cooper does his best not to show his age, and summon up a little of the “Aw shucks” of “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” or “Sergeant York” to play this fellow who just wants “to be left alone.”
Whatever forward-thinking values were inculcated in Michener’s source material, the film itself can’t help but lapse into the dated and backward as it drifts into its last acts, the buttoned-down ’50s reasserting themselves after the opening acts’ “pre-code” romp.
Director Robson, best known for his film of Ring Lardner’s “Champion” when he filmed this, went on to make a Korean War drama “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” based on Michener’s novel, and even “Peyton Place” and “Valley of the Dolls.”
Cooper was finishing up a bracing period of his career which included “High Noon.” His short run as a screen patriarch (“Gentle Persuasion”) would be hastened by the abortive “middle aged playboy” turn in “Love in the Afternoon,” which just underscored how he shouldn’t play the guy who “gets the girl” any longer.
Cary Grant learned from Cooper’s mistakes. Eventually.
And “Return to Paradise,” coming after the Broadway musical “South Pacific,” would help sell Hollywood on Michener’s bankability, that he was tapping into the post-war public’s appetite for island stories. His pitch for a series sailing from island to island for “Adventures in Paradise” would come a few years later. Even John Ford’s shambolic but scenic “Donovan’s Reef” spun out an uncredited Michener pitch.
It wasn’t until “Centennial,” Michener’s mainland America epic, that everybody figured out that Mr. Thousand-Page Books was best suited for mini series treatment.
But you can still find the author’s themes, style and devotion to the romance and adventure of his war years in the South Pacific in “Return to Paradise,” a dated picture a little ahead of its time, just like the writer who inspired it.
Rating: “approved,” violence
Cast: Gary Cooper, Roberta Haynes, Barry Jones, Moira Walker, John Hudson, Mamea Matatumua and Hans Kruse.
Credits: Directed by Mark Robson, scripted by Charles Kaufman, based on a story by James Michener. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon and other streaming platforms
Running time: 1:29
If he didn’t learn to play the accordion as prep I’ll be very disappointed in “The Chosen One.” Very disappointed.
Roku has this fall release, which is great news. EVERYbody’ll see it. Well, those of us who love free (with commercials) teeVee, anyway.
“In a New York Minute” is a film anthology that tells three loosely-connected stories about the female Chinese-American experience in New York.
It’s a melodrama that traffics in diaspora generalizations that aren’t necessarily the most flattering, and whose messaging and level of connectivity isn’t wholly cleared up in its finale. But it’s an intriguing enough debut feature by director and co-writer Ximan Li that one hopes she gets to film another, even if this one is only now making its way to the public three years after its film festival run.
Amy Chang plays a 40ish New York food critic and editor whose last break-up has landed her in therapy with a disastrous malady for someone in her line of work. She can’t eat. Food triggers her, and the stress of that, her work, her loneliness and her mother’s stereotypical “When are you getting married/having kids?” nagging is pushing her to the edge.
This persistent, annoyingly solicitous colleague (Jae Shin) is giving her the full-court press — cooking “porridge” and broth for her, so under foot that the viewer is on tenterhooks waiting for the accomplished Amy to blow him off with extreme prejudice. She doesn’t.
Angel Li (Yi Liu) is a Chinese actress married to an older, somewhat disinterested non-Asian (Erik Lochtefeld) who gives off a “mail order bride” vibe. The visual prompts of their “loveless” marriage don’t paper over Angel’s mercenary ruthlessness in pursuing her own agenda. Her younger lover/screenwriter (Ludi Lin) is keeping his options open, hitting the clubs for “meetings” every night he can. Angel’s “What if I told you I was pregnant?” speaks volumes, even if she says “Just kidding” afterwards.
She needs a man to support her acting career, and if she was willing to marry some 50something white businessman to get what she wants, what else might she try?
Nina (Celia Au) is a bottle girl, escort and sex worker whose love and main client is heading back to China, forcing her to take stock. She’s living above the family Chinese restaurant, and her money grubbing step-mother (Yan Xi) is making is making her pay for her father’s healthcare, underwrite her bratty step-brother’s education and pay back the small fortune they raised to buy/bribe her way to a visa out of China.
And there’s this down-to-earth food-truck operator Ian (Roger Yeh) whose American dream is his own place (restaurant) can be “our” own place. Her fellow sex-workers may remind her that “Nice guys don’t mix with girls like us.” But Ian’s offer has her dreaming and weighing the pros and cons.
Ximan Li’s first gimmick here is tying these three stories together. Two characters are neighbors, Amy’s magazine is doing “acted” video review/visits of restaurants they write about, which throws her and Angel together and Nina’s father’s restaurant is one of the places where these video reviews are shot.
The overlapping goes further than that, so much so that I had to rewatch portions of “In a New York Minute” just to see who winds up at whose karaoke “bottle” club table, who is ditching whom and just how Angel’s first New York indie movie — she plays a woman jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, an impossibility, her screenwriter beau notes — fits into all this.
It does, just not all that neatly. Li takes few pains to underline moments and connections that make this tale told with a largely unknown cast to make sense.
And then there’s the second gimmick, Early Pregnancy Tests that the women whip out and brandish as pleas, threats or just revelations to their men. Is that like a New York thing, or more Chinese and Chinese-American?
The performances are gutsy insofar as the men generally come off as feckless and the women as somewhat faithless, not that Li isn’t presenting them as victims — each in her own way.
The muddled climax to the film underscores how frustrating the picture is. “New York Minute” is both intriguing and off-putting, with a couple of seriously unromantic proposals suggesting “arrangements” and “mergers” more than love. The viewer can freely wonder if anybody on the screen is capable of love, and if the film’s contrived “choice” facing its heroines, “love” or “freedom,” is any choice at all, or even if the words mean the same thing in East and West.
Rating: unrated, sexual situations, sex work, profanity, alcohol abuse
Cast: Amy Chang, Yi Liu, Celia Au, Jae Shin, Yan Xi, Ludi Len, Erik Lochtefeld and Roger Yeh.
Credits: Directed by Ximan Li, scripted by Ximan Li, Yilei Zhou. A Gravitas Ventures release
Running time: 1:42
June 16, it’s your turn to “Go to hell.”
The Mexican “40 Years Young (Cuarentones)” is a midlife crisis romantic dramedy that’s so slow that I had to check to make sure Netflix wasn’t experiencing screen-freeze.
Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle.
The cast is cute and seem to possess the light touch whatever they were going for requires. But nothing happens in this movie — nothing funny, nothing that dramatic, nothing particularly romantic. It’s 81 minutes of nada.
An opening scene establishes that Cesar (Erick Elias) and Paolo (Adal Ramones) are partners in a popular Mexico City Italian eatery, L’Allegria, where they’re not just the chefs, they’re the singing, joking, charming floor show. That’s one seriously open kitchen and one potentially entertaining way to connect with customers.
We only see this promising “concept” in one solitary scene.
They’re having money troubles, with Paolo’s two exes and kids back in Italy needing upkeep.
Cesar? Everything’s grand, with sexy wife Amelia (Ximena Gonzalez-Rubio), tween son Enrique (Ricardo Zertuche) and his mother around to see his success. They’re planning a big European vacation.
All it takes is one impending 40th birthday — Cesar’s — to take down the whole house of cards.
Actually, his 40th has little to do with that, even though he’s keenly aware that his father died at 40. He can be childlike forever, right?
“Forty is the new 12, after all.”
Only Cesar is not childish, not upbeat and not even that much fun. Imagine how he’ll be when he brags about his mother’s good health just before she drops dead, when Amelia introduces him to her ex, who’s been in prison for ten years and is probably the father of her son.
Perfect time to get away to sunny, sandy Acapulco, where L’Allegria’s duo will compete in a week-long cook-off with the best chefs in Mexico for “Delicacies” magazine’s $20,000 prize.
Cesar’s marriage is ending, the son he doted on isn’t his, he’s just lost his mother.
Maybe we should be surprised that he doesn’t set off sparks with vacationing Chicagoan Naomi (Gaby Espino) as Paolo is hitting on her BFF Selina (Sonia Couogh). But this is a rom-com, you know. Sparks are supposed to happen.
The central couple doesn’t click, the cooking scenes are abbreviated and practically food-free and the “contest” has little conflict, despite the snobby director of it (Miguel Pizarro) obviously having it in for these “entertainer” chefs.
“Your clients all leave…enchanted,” he hisses (in Spanish or dubbed into English), as if that’s a bad thing.
A trip to a romantic swimming grotto, a potentially romantic snorkeling trip and all we get is the barest glimpse of scenery and maybe a single scene with the potential to amuse or “enchant.”
And it doesn’t.
Rating: TV-MA, for no particular reason
Cast: Erick Elias, Gaby Espino, Adal Ramones,
Ximena Gonzalez-Rubio, Sonio Couoh, Ricardo Zertuche, Antonio Fortier
Miguel Pizarro
Credits: Scripted and directed by Pietro Loprieno. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:21
Hard to get a bead on exactly what’s happening in this creepy trailer to a May 17 release.
Haunted place? Haunted people? An older woman with Alzheimer’s is hunted by a horror in Herefordshire.
Always alliterate.
It was a city remote enough from the rest of the world’s experience or knowledge of Chinese geography that we couldn’t place it on a map. But Wuhan’s name would enter the consciousness in infamy as a global pandemic burst out of this Hubei Province metropolis. It became a symbol of Chinese failings as a society and secretive totalitarian state.
Filmmaker Yung Chang’s “Wuhan Wuhan” is a documentary filmed by being embedded in the city of 11 million as “ground zero” of this devastating pandemic wrestled with COVID-19 and ordinary people faced up to the fear, the confusion and grim realities of a total lockdown.
Though other films have followed the drama of those earliest days there — “In the Same Breath” and “76 Days” — Chang’s film takes the unusual tack of personalizing the pandemic, and humanizing the first population trapped in it.
The “Wuhan Virus” and “Wuhan” as pejorative insult –American politicians who bungled and politized the pandemic were nicknamed “Wuhan Don” and “Wuhan Ron” — recede as we see put human faces on doctors, an expectant couple and others just coping with this extraordinary event that they didn’t cause any more than we did.
Jumping into the lockdown in Feb. 2020, we meet Yin, a factory worker on furlough who now works as a volunteer delivery driver for medical personnel, doctors and nurses he picks up from their homes or (in the case of those shipped in to help) from hotels to the city’s many hospitals and makeshift overflow wards in civic buildings.
A GoPro camera in his makeshift rideshare captures candid conversations between Yin and assorted unnamed “front line” responders. It’s “hard to see the end of this” right now, one nurse sighs. “The actual number (of infected and dying) is more than we know” right now, another admits.
They are as exhausted as the many viral video testimonials that medical professionals in the West posted during their darkest days. But these people, wrapped in Personal Protective Equipment of a more DIY nature until they get to work where they don hospital-provided protection, are speaking out in ways we never hear the People’s Republic allow.
At home, Xi, Yin’s wife, is concerned, eating and craving meat as she is 37 weeks pregnant. She’s about to give birth and as more than one rider tells Yin, “a hospital isn’t safe to be in right now.”
We hear and see government public address vans ride around passing on information and instructions, a chilling bit of “1984” Big Brother-speak about the fact that “the state has implemented number twelve notice,” a lockdown, and that everyone is ordered indoors. “Contact your local committee” if you have questions.
In the hospital, patients gripe and family members advocate for and pitch in to help ensure good care of their children or spouses. An officious nurse calls a rebelling 50ish man’s wife when she’s had enough of his “To HELL with treatment, I’ll just die here!”
The patients, like the hospitals, are numbered — impersonalized. But we see the people behind the bureaucracy.
The ER chief at one hospital, Dr. Zheng, respectfully argues with higher-ups about the quality of Red Cross-donated PPE, and we see the exhausted staff’s work-arounds. Staff members use magic markers to write each other’s names and titles on the disposable plastic outer wear. Custom embroidered scrubs and lab coats and name tags are among the casualties of the emergency.
A patient who has been there a while comes to the filmmaker and gives an impromptu testimonial.
“He is the best doctor here,” she enthuses (in Mandarin with English subtitles). “I only know his voice. I’ve never seen his face.”
Chang’s film doesn’t give us much of an overview, doesn’t investigate or judge, doesn’t dwell on the unsanitary “live” markets where the disease made the jump from animals to humans (the “lab created” myth has been floated and shot down repeatedly in the past two years).
He just lets us see a Wuhan version of what we watched on the nightly news play out in New York at the peak of the pandemic and shows us the faces, the hopes and fears of those coping, at a personal level, with this awful event that’s taken over their lives.
And he lets us hear in Chinese what we’ve heard in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, a phrase that became global as this contagion tore through humanity in wave after wave.
“This is the new normal now.”
Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Yung Chang. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:30
Thrillers beyond number have been built on the “throw a bunch of characters together and ‘test’ them” trope. So why not “Escape the Field?”
Characters wakes up in a tractless/endless corn patch, with a single sinister scarecrow watching over it. Each person has some item — gun with a single bullet, knife, matches, compass, lantern, etc. — that might help them all get out.
And hanging over them all is the knowledge that someone drugged and dropped them here, and someone or some thing is out there amongst the rotting stalks, manipulating and maybe even hunting them.
Jordan Claire Robbins of “Supernatural” is Sam, the nurse, the first victim we meet and the first to blurt out “Where AM I?
Theo Rossi of “Sons of Anarchy” plays Tyler, who seems rational…or sketchy.
Shane West — “Bane” on TV’s “Gotham” — is bossy and butch and tough and twisted and ex-military, a hothead with a guilty conscience and a tendency towards mistrust.
Because as this “team” assembles in the middle of this field, not everybody is totally honest with everybody else. And when they get the notion that others have been out here before them, and people get snatched out of the frame by whatever is imprisoning, hunting and injuring or testing them, “working together” to work-the-problem seems like a goal beyond their reach.
If you’ve watched more than a few movies or binged on “The Twilight Zone,” you’ve probably invested in a version of this — “Maze Runner,” “And Then There Were None,” “In the Tall Grass,” the theater’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” “Twilight Zone’s” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” the variations are endless.
But in our “Escape Room” era, screenplays have a tendency to emphasize “the puzzle” that all must cooperate to solve side of the story. And forcing logic on this, over-explaining it and the solution that three screenwriters come up with lets the players down.
The more we know, the less mysterious and less interesting “Escape the Field” is. The more that’s revealed, the more obvious the panic amongst those writers becomes.
The players struggle to escape the archetypes they’re playing and the plot they’re selling.
Fear fades and the back-engineered, over-thought and above all else over-explained problem and solution take over the movie As the terror of the unknown is vanishes, we shrug off the characters and their predicaments.
Any worries about them shaking in their boots take a back seat to us shaking our damned heads.
Rating: R for violence and language
Cast: Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Shane West, Tahirah Sharif, Elena Juatco, Julian Feder, Niki Kerro
Credits: Directed by Emerson Moore, scripted by Emerson Moore, Sean Wathen and Joshua Dobkin. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:29
A Frenchwoman of a certain age considers the question from the US Customs officer at LAX, and speaks her mind.
“I want to start a new life.”
And so she sort of does, 50 and “putting herself out back there” with the guidance of that Everywoman’s LA accessory, the gay BFF. And as she’s dating again, she’s writing (in voice over) an autobiographical screenplay about her neglectful, self-absorbed “diva” mother who left her in a small boarding school as a child, deliberately letting the child Lisa think it was something she did that caused this first of many abandonments.
“I Love America” makes a decent 50something showcase for the almost-ageless Sophie Marceau (“Braveheart,” “The World is Not Enough”) and pretty much nothing else. It’s a dry, somewhat vapid “French sophisticate in LA” dramedy about parenting, love, age and finding closure as the heroine of your own story.
And if writer-director Lisa Azuelos, who teamed with Marceau for the equally empty “LOL” 15 years ago, doesn’t utterly waste our time and Marceau’s, that’s only because Marceau doesn’t let her.
Lisa arrives in LA just as her mother (Sophie Verbeeck) takes a terminal turn for the worse back in France, “pissing me off to the end,” the daughter grumps (in French, with English subtitles).
But getting past that, her already-in-LA gay bartender pal Luka (Djanis Bouzyan) puts her on dating apps, drops her age from 50 to “43” and invites direct messages by the hundreds, most of them on the sliding scale of lascivious to crude.
The dates begin, a middling string of older-men-pretending-to-be-young and one dedicated cougar hunter (Colin Woodell) who insists a dating app can lead to something permanent and meaningful.
These outings, often connecting to the discos and disco of her youth, prompt flashbacks to the wounds of childhood — her “playboy” and out of his depth (not married to Mom) dad, Julien (Hubert Benhamdine), whom she nicknames “Judas,” her mother’s “new life” and new family pushing Lisa further into the background.
The running theme of these memories as they work their way into the screenplay within the screenplay is a life of longing for unfulfilled needs, scars Lisa made a decision to not pass on to her own kids, whom “I created to make sure someone loves me on this planet,” with much of what she encounters in LaLa Land being a potential trigger — “reunions,” etc.
Every so often, Lisa talks about Los Angeles, the movies and the cinematic landmarks of her life that live on there — “The Way We Were” to “The Big Lebowski.”
Azuelos renders all this in sweeping strokes of randomness — Lisa breaking her “no sex on the first date” rule, Luka living out some sort of ’80s gay cliche — hookups that can’t recall ever meeting him — mixed with modern LA gay stereotypes (Luka’s ex has married and has a child with his new partner).
The entire affair seems researched by watching lesser Hollywood films and sitcoms. Luka’s high-end apartment and cherry condition 1966 Mustang convertible make one wonder about bartender salaries in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Marceau remains an arresting screen presence, but that’s severely tested by Azuelos’ inane, meandering and trite tale of love, loss and closure, wrapped in a female wish fulfillment fantasy.
Rating: unrated, nudity and sex, profanity
Cast: Sophie Marceau, Sophie Verbeeck, Colin Woodell and Djanis Bouzyani
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lisa Azuelos. An Amazon release.
Running time: 1:43
