By “Bridgerton” I mean the color blind casting that compensates for history and literature’s erasure of people of color from the Napoleonic Era and Britain on the cusp of the 18th century.
The Shonda Rhimes sex and plenty of it element may be missing. It’s ever so PG.
Freida Pinto, Sope Dirisu, Naoko Mori, Divian Ladwa and Theo James are among the players of many races and ethnicities who tell this story.
A hit novel comes to the screen. Soon.
Here’s all you need to know about this ever-so-slight teen romance from Mexico, “Anonymously Yours.”
It’s all about how two kids meet by mistake via texts, and decide to keep their “relationship” secret — “No personal information, no pictures, no clues,” (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed into English). They don’t even realize that they’re in high school detention together, grudgingly forced to do “the kind of honest (manual labor projects) that your privilege makes you think is beneath you,” people who don’t like each other who gradually get to know one another.
At some point they have to figure out that this secret “relationship” they’ve developed via text is actually aspiring filmmaker Valeria (Annie Cabello) and scholarship loner Alex (Marco Antonio Morales de la Peña), right? For good or ill, that’s got to come out by the rules of rom-coms.
Alas, director and co-writer Maria Torres (“This is Tomas”) absolutely blows this Big Moment. It barely manages a sputter, and hardly even merits a mention.
So the cute stuff about a tony, high-end high school and its tolerance — the cute lesbian couple (Estefi Merelles, Alicia Vélez) who’re friends with our two “anonymous” flirters, the business with Vale’s “films” and her efforts to convince her elevator business family to let her go to film school, Alex’s loneliness since his martial arts loving dad died — all that’s wasted.
A timid, limp noodle of a teen romance doesn’t do all that much to build up to its big moment, blows the big moment, and that’s that.
They meet in the dead of night. Some girl gave him the wrong number, and they start texting.
She’s struggling in school, distracted by the cinema and her passion to work in it. He’s alone in a new school.
“I don’t want to get to know them, or them to get to know me.”
Two disaffected kids find each other by accident, only decide to keep their digital distance.
And then detention gets in the way — mouthy and rude Vale, picked-on-and-fights-back Alex tied together gardening and painting the school for an hour each day.
Still texting, but now they’re trying hard to get around revealing the fact that they’re running into this cute member of the opposite sex in detention, at parties, etc.
The leads are more attractive than affecting. The romance is lukewarm at best, more middle school chaste than high school hot.
There’s nothing here that would hold your average adult’s attention for more than a few minutes. Kids? Maybe it’ll seem new enough and relatable to them.
But any 100 minute movie with 40 minutes of story, one that blows the romance pretty much entirely and takes a dive in its big moment, is something even teens will outgrow before the closing credits.
Rating: TV-14, teen drinking, profanity
Cast: Annie Cabello, Marco Antonio Morales de la Peña, Estefi Merelles, Alicia Vélez and Harold Azuara.
Credits: Directed by Maria Torres, scripted by Alexandro Aldrete, Daniela Gómez and Maria Torres. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
Forget the cop-out of an anti-climax that the makers of “The Policeman’s Lineage” insisted upon, and you’ve got a decent thriller built around the struggle for a young Korean cop’s soul.
Director Lee Kyu-maan and screenwriter Bae Young-Ik set up Choi Woo-sik of “Okja” and the Oscar-winning “Parasite” as Choi, scrupulous young third generation cop trapped between two feuding superiors, each apparently worse than or at least as unethical as the other.
As one is the celebrated Det. Park, played by Cho Jin-woong of “The Handmaiden,” famous for his network of “informers” and the busts that result from them, and the other is the Internal Affairs Chief Ho (Park Hee-soon of “1987: When the Day Comes”), who sent Choi undercover to find the dirt on Park, you see the kid’s dilemma.
Add in the fact that Park was there the day Choi’s cop-dad was killed, and there are all these feelings, summed up in flashbacks to that fateful day and Choi’s cop-worshipping youth, to consider.
Even though Choi was chosen for this job thanks to his turning in and testifying against an older cop fond of torturing suspects, Park’s elite squad takes him in and Park makes the kid his driver.
What’s the wily older cop’s play here? Is he keeping somebody he should beware of close to him to monitor the new guy’s activities? Is he that careless? Or is he merely guileless because his heart is pure?
Ho is obsessed with getting his man, a “dirty cop” who is “a tumor who must be removed with a scalpel.” Ho isn’t shy about taking shortcuts to “justice” either.
But when we see Choi driving Park around in his big Mercedes, takes a look around the detective chief’s swank apartment filled with designer Gucci and Burberry fashions, and gets to ride on the boss’s big fishing boat, he and we have to wonder if Ho is right on the money.
“I knew your father” carries some weight. And Park’s reasoning — playing the big shot so that he can get close to the rich mobsters he’s pursuing (Kwon Yul and Park Myeong-hoon) –seems sound.
“We have to meet them to catch them,” he rationalizes (in Korean with English subtitles). Exclusive poker games and the like back that up.
But who is playing whom here?
The players are in fine form here, with Cho poker-faced and Choi letting us see his character’s nerves. The villains are loud and vile, and are in barely enough scenes to stand out.
Crime-film specialist Lee (“Child…”) gets our heroes and villains into some awful tussles even as the clues that point the viewer to conclusions that Choi takes forever to catch up to.
I sensed an imbalance to the screenplay, a need to build up Ho and suggest more of a tug-of-war over Choi’s loyalties and future than the film delivers. A couple of scenes show Ho’s obsession. A couple more would have helped.
And then there’s the whole “cop-out” “anticlimax” thing that takes the sting out of the finale. Boo!
Up until then, though, this is a tense, sometimes exciting police procedural dirty-cop hunt that works, that maintains some of its mystery and delivers righteous violence in just the right doses.
Rating: Unrated, violence, drug content
Cast: Cho Jin-woong, Choi Woo-sik, Hee-soon Park, Kwon Yul and Park Myeong-hoon
Credits: Directed by Lee Kyu-maan, scripted by Bae Young-Ik An Echelon release, available for sale or streaming June 7.
Running time: 1:59
Tom Cruise’s biggest opening weekend ever proves that there was pent up demand for that “Top Gun” sequel, no matter how much time has passed or how middling the first movie was.
Tuesday and Thursday previews rolled into Friday has “Maverick” at almost $52 million heading into Sat. showings.
Paramount is saying it’ll do $123 or so Fri-thru-Sunday, and Memorial Day Monday will take it over $150.
But what about “Bob’s Burgers,” you say, animation but not necessarily for kids? A $5.7 million Friday points to a $19 million holiday weekend for Twentieth Century pictures.
“Doctor Strange” had a middling $4-5 million Friday and won’t hit $20 this weekend. Finally.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” continues to hold audience and add to its status as the biggest hit A24 has ever released. Another $3.1 million by Monday night, clearing the $57.5 mark. Over $60 by next weekend, topping out at $70? $75?
“The Lost City” added another $1.9 to finally clear the $100 million mark. Maybe Sandy Bullock needs to team up with TC.
“Men” isn’t setting the world on fire. Another $1.5, just over $6 and counting.
Figures from Exhibitor Relations — ercboxoffice.com — and Box Office Pro
“Beast” is an awkward blend of camp, over-the-top action picture and even campier over-produced production numbers featuring gorgeous stars of the Indian cinema and a sea of sexily-choreographed Indian extras.
Two and a half hours of slaughter, song and dance?
“In a situation like this,” one ineffectual official sputters (in Tamil with English subtitles) outside a mall that’s been taken over by terrorists, “did you really expect to see a terrorist’s head fly out the window?”
Yes, today’s “Around the World with Netflix” outing reminds us that there’ll always be a Bollywood.
Thalapathy Vijay and Pooja Hegde co-star in this Nelson Dilipkumar film. “Veera” is an ex-cop suffering from the mildest (most inexpressive, anyway) case of PTSD ever. An elaborately choreographed raid to shoot up dozens of terrorists to capture their leader got a little girl killed.
His “recovery” is complete when he joins an incompetent Tamilnadu (South Indian state) private security firm run by an aging lummox (Vtv Ganesh). That’s also the workplace of this beauty, Preetha (Hegde), who came on to him at a wedding (not hers) and promptly ditched her “short” and clingy fiance.
If Veera and Preetha lead the entire wedding party in a rowdy, super-sexy and riotously over-the-top dance-off, it must be love.
First day on the job? A mall that fired them as their “security” is taken over by terrorists who want to bargain for their leader’s release. Veera must stab, strangle and behead his way through the bad guys to save the day, get the girl and sing and dance happily ever after.
Two disparate genres like this are only ever mashed up on the Subcontinent. And while the singing and dancing are but bookends — there’s no twerking, popping or locking in the midst of the mayhem — large passages of this movie underscore how ill-suited they are paired-up in the same film.
Veera loudly shoots and grenades his way through minions in the film’s opening battle, while in the building next door, terrorist leaders sit quietly, discuss their plans and sip tea, not hearing the bedlam a few meters away.
The hostage incident has comic relief — two bumbling security slobs named “Jack” and “Jill” (Redin Kingsley and Yogi Babu) — and a painfully elaborate string of “Kill this guy this way” and “that guy another way” episodes, dully interrupted by what inept officials are twiddling their thumbs over outside.
It’s never as funny as it should be, nor as grimly exciting as it might have been, although there’s a giddy Fosse-meets-hip hop quality to the song and dance, and the wirework/FX-littered fights have their John Woo moments.
Vijay is more convincing as a singing actor than as a badass, and there’s no subtlety to either pose. And Hegde needs to work outside of the patriarchal Indian cinema for us to see if she’s more than a beauty who can sing and dance. Writer-director Nelson — how he bills himself, but I hear he’s considering “Lord Nelson” — gives her nothing to do here.
Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence aplenty
Cast: Thalapathy Vijay, Pooja Hegde, Vtv Ganesh, Yogi Babu, Redin Kingsley and Shine Tom Chacko
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nelson Dilipkumar . A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:36
Wondrous.
“Cordelia” is about a London actress of that name rehearsing King Lear’s youngest daughter, his favorite, in Shakespeare’s play.
There’s something about Cordelia — the actress, not the Bard’s “banished” for most of “King Lear” character — that seems a bit off. And no, the “character” isn’t much of a clue as to what. Again, “banished” early in the play.
Our Cordelia (Antonia Campbell-Hughes of “Split” and “Paul, Apostle of Christ”) is skittish, paranoid, and gives us the impression she’s been this way for years. She has a recurring nightmare which takes her back to “The Tube.” Something happened on London’s subway. Anybody can see that.
She’s very dependent on her twin sister and roommate Caroline (Guess who? Again?), not so much trapped in their father’s old basement flat as not quite whole when she’s away from it.
“I just want to feel normal, no ‘reminders,'” Cordelia says after bumping into an old beau on the street.
You just need to “start living in the real world, with other people in it” is Caroline’s diagnosis.
Theater might be therapy for her, and when the film about her frazzled state begins, she’s still only an understudy. So maybe they’re humoring her.
But someone is calling her flat and hanging up. Something about that dream is freaking her out.
And all of a sudden, there’s this handsome cellist Frank (Johnny Flynn) who lives upstairs, and is so disarming and charming that she finds herself kind of swept along with him — taking The Tube again, learning he named his cello “Valerie” after his first “unrequited” love, meeting him in his regular pub, only to wonder what caused him to sneak out and call her, desperate for her to take Valerie and slip out the back door.
We’re left with two puzzles in director and co-writer Anthony Shergold’s paranoid thriller. What is Cordelia’s secret? And what is Frank’s deal, anyway?
Shergold (“Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman” and TV’s “Persuasion”) makes the puzzles rather obvious before turning them in on themselves and making us second guess our first guesses.
Frank’s a trifle too charming and forward. Cordelia’s a bit too obviously unstable. Or is he? Or she?
I found “Cordelia” an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.
Campbell-Hughes channels Charlotte Gainsbourg in this performance, taking on a sort of resting-wounded-face that begs the question of what’s going on in her head and how real and straightforward this handsome cellist could be, because she’s depressing to be around.
And Shergold makes great use of that in a thriller that doesn’t really take on classic “thriller” elements until late in the game, even as it keeps asking more questions than it answers.
Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Johnny Flynn, Joel Fry and Michael Gambon
Credits: Directed by Adrian Shergold, scripted by Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Adrian Shergold. A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:31
Oscar-winning effects and stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett helped get “Star Wars” off the ground and won an Oscar for bringing dinosaurs back to life in “Jurassic Park.”
But for 30 years, in between “Robocop” sequels and installments in the “Twilight Saga,” he’s been working on this dense, gooey Big Statement on his art and perhaps his philosophy of life. And now “Mad God” is done and coming to the general public via Shudder.
It’s a sunglasses-at-night dark-and darker-blend of stop motion animation with bits of actors in live action scenes, with nobody talking in anything other than gibberish.
Take the title as a face-value pun and it’s a commentary on religion and life in general, as we follow a WWI gas-masked figure into an industrial wasteland underworld only a “Mad God” could conceive, where everything and everyone is consumed, chewed-up or merely randomly snuffed-out, with no sound effect spared to heighten the ickiness.
Primitive faceless slaves service — and self-sacrifice into — all-consuming steam punk furnaces. Doll-girls in chains hang from cages and grotesque monsters cast-off from “Ghostbusters” menace one and all in this Hell of Forever War, where everything and everyone is just fodder — fuel — with little clear idea who’s at the top of this nauseating “food chain.”
Maybe the doctor/mad scientist “God” of it all? He’s played by director turned actor Alex Cox (“Sid & Nancy”), the bug-eyed embodiment of “madman” or “Mad God.”
Strip away the honored credentials of the filmmaker and the tortured back story of this passion-project — something virtually no critics seem willing to do — and what we’re left with is an artist’s descent into obsession, crawling so far up his arse that nobody but him can see the light.
I’m reminded of the similarly-obsessive “The Thief and the Cobbler,” a 28-years-in-the-making hand-animated mess that grew more confused and more baroque the longer it stayed in production. The obscurant rag-doll-after-the-apocalypse animated “9” is another ready comparison here, although it made sense and was easier to follow and didn’t gestate for a third of a century.
“Incoherence” wasn’t necessarily the goal. But if it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.
Rating: unrated, gross.
Cast: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda, Harper Taylor, Brynn Taylor
Credits: Scripted and directed by Phil Tippett. A Shudder release.
Running time: 1:23
Reza Akhlaghirad wears a sullen scowl — first scene to last — in Mohammad Rasoulof’s bitter, biting indictment of life in corrupt, theocratic Iran, “A Man of Integrity.”
His character, Reza, is tested again and again, a surly and stubborn Muslim Job whose privacy, livelihood, property and civil rights are trampled on by bullying local power brokers and an indifferent bureaucracy that won’t do anything about it without the proper bribes.
It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare set in a suburban town where justice is bought and paid for and fighting the status quo is quixotic, and dangerous.
Reza raises goldfish. He’s mortgaged to the max, but he won’t pay the suggested bribes to assorted bank officials to avoid late fees. He’d rather sell the family car to pay whart he ownes, and let wife Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee) take the truck to the girl’s school, where she is head teacher. “Proud” and “stubborn” go hand in hand with “integrity” as far as Reza is concerned. He’s setting an example for his young son.
But to raise and sell goldfish, he needs access to water. “The Company” isn’t intent on letting him have it, and a parade of local officials have been bought off to ensure that his protests won’t get anywhere.
An off-camera tangle with Abbas, the local enforcer of Company edicts lands them both in jail. But Reza’s grossly unequal treatment should be his last, best warning.
“Sell your land and leave,” his brother-in-law (Misagh Zare) urges. Hadis makes a short trip from “Do what you think is right” to figuring out bribes and making threats to the child of Abbas at school to realizing the futility of it all, as human-engineered calamities befall them.
“We are ruined,” she laments, in Persian with English subtitles.
There’s very little shouting in this marriage. Most debates are settled in stare-downs. But whatever the couple decides to do, every avenue of escape seems cut off and every escalation leads to deadly overreactions.
Movies and other works of art should, ideally, be considered on the merits of what’s in front of you, not the back-story of the production or trials of the filmmaker. That’s never the case, and when it comes to writer-director Rasoulof, knowing that his movies (“Manuscripts Don’t Burn”) are generally banned in Iran and that he was imprisoned for filming without permission, informs what we see on the screen.
The first scene here has Reza furtively making watermelon liquor right up to the moment the Sharia Law enforcers show up on a motorbike. Two impertinent punks search his house, take his hunting shotgun and tell him to renew the license and retrieve it “at the mosque.”
Every legitimate avenue of protest is a futile quest for “justice” that has disappeared. It’s chilling to watch, even more so when you consider the open corruption that’s moved into the spotlight, unpunished in America thanks to a bought-and-paid-for court system and utterly compromised Supreme Court.
Rasoulof doesn’t take into account the viewer’s growing frustration as we wait for intervention, retribution or revenge. In keeping many of the steps Reza finds himself forced to take off-camera, the film’s third act struggles to coherently make its points or provide logical satisfaction in its resolution.
This is maddening, and the people who have resigned themselves to it — “oppressors” and “the oppressed” — just amplify the feeling of impotence we start to share with the characters.
Through it all, Akhlaghirad makes a fine, seething muse for Rasoulof, a character who never quite gave up his student protestor past now speaking for a filmmaker who plainly never outgrew his, either.
Rating: PG-13, implied violence, drug content
Cast: Reza Akhlaghirad, Soudabeh Beizaee, Nasim Adabi, Misagh Zare, Zeinab Shabani, Zhila Shahi
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. A Big World release.
Running time: 1:56
Impressive looking, beautifully scored and cut in ways that touch the heart…and make you forget the black mark against Ron Howard’s track record that “Willow” once was.
Nice to see Warwick Davis get another turn in his only real star vehicle.
But seriously?
Movie Nation 