That uneasy feeling that the dark, downbeat Turkish road picture “Godspeed” might be dipping into propaganda every now and again are borne out by the film’s closing credits, referring to dead Turkish troops fighting Turkish (and Syrian and Iraqi) Kurds as “martyrs.”
So whatever else “Godspeed (Yolun Açik Olsun)” has going on, there’s an Erdogan government line that’s being parroted, at least as far as the film’s combat-veterans subtext is concerned. And Turks will have to grit their teeth over non-Turkish viewers refusing to swallow their BS. We know Turkey’s record of violence against civilians and failing to admit atrocities.
So take that element of the movie with a “Well, that’s their (official) view of things” grain of salt.
Mehmet Ada Öztekin’s film of a Hakan Evrensel novel is a slow but engrossing character study on wheels, a story of post-traumatic stress dealt with on one final mission, a road trip. It’s a tale too concerned with keeping a secret that’s not a secret at all, and condoning behavior that has might warrant a police “all points bulletin” elsewhere. But it’s well-acted and quite watchable.
We meet Capt. Salih (Engin Akyürek, good) and his trusted lieutenant Kerim (Tolga Saritas, sharp) as they’re ransacking the captain’s house looking for cash. His wife Duygo (Belfu Benian) stashed it somewhere. So as soon as Salih finishes shining his shoe, he hunts until he finds a roll of bills, and they’re off.
He’s taking his personally-restored 1974 Mercedes 220 cross country to a wedding.
But the shoe he shined was on the foot of his prosthetic leg. He lost the real one to a landmine. The cash isn’t all he grabbed. He also picked up his army pistol. The car, which he restored, was the one that his parents died in. The wedding they’re attending is one Salih is hellbent on preventing.
And the reason he’s in something of a rush? He busted out of a hospital where he was in protective police custody, “under investigation.” Salih’s wife knows and she’s frantic. Her husband’s snapped.
“Godspeed” follows the grimly-focused Salih and much more laid back Kerim on a trek through mountains and arid plains, on their way to the coastal town where the wedding is scheduled. Salih is just now coming to grips with his lost limb.
“I won’t be able to play six-a-side soccer any more,” he gripes (in Turkish, or dubbed into English).
“Do you even HAVE five friends?”
We see flashbacks of the pre-combat Kerim’s life, and snippets of their combat duty — carrying out patrols, dodging friendly fire and hunting for snipers.
And we follow their post-combat odyssey, where Salih deals with intrusive “lost leg” questions from a mechanic, steals a partridge slated to be dinner from a rural shopkeeper and waves his pistol at hunters, waiters, all sorts of folks.
His wife Duygo’s search for help from the police earns a “Nobody will look” shrug from them.
This isn’t going to end well, we figure. Well, unless the picture turns more melodramatic than it already is.
“Godspeed” could do with a lot more banter between the army buddies and a lighter touch, here and there. Salih’s more human impulses — helping stranded motorists who can’t let themselves be searched at any police checkpoint, stealing that partridge — are overwhelmed by his grimly seething sense of purpose.
We quickly guess what that is, and we get it. He’s got no time for nonsense. But the whole structure of this and most any road picture has “quixotic” and “misadventure” built into it. Öztekin spends his generous allotment of screen time playing up the cynicism, reinforcing (and subtly criticizing) the acknowledged “duty” young men have to do their army service, the injustice of welfare-for-some, but not the one-legged mechanic who was never offered a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg.
The film has polish and just enough pace in between pauses for “episodes” along the way, as well as flashbacks that fill in a story we already figured out back in the first act.
But Salih’s recognizably crazy and dangerous from start to finish, and that deadens the story’s impact. We should get glimpses that he’s redeemable, bigger doses of his humanity. All we get instead are plenty of suggestions that he’s made mistakes and that he’s made up his mind, and that we should take his point and agree with it, in lock-step.
There’s bitterness and grief and guilt in ample supply. “Martyred” or not, shouldn’t we get more scenes that allow us to take a liking to this armed and dangerous headcase?
Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity
Cast: Engin Akyürek, Tolga Saritas, Belfu Benian and Oyku Naz Altay
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mehmet Ada Öztekin, based on a novel by Hakan Evrensel. A Netflix release.
It’s been all over Twitter this weekend, trending just below the latest from the pasty-faced Apartheid perv and “DOWN go the Celtics!”
Why was Peter Pan turned into the villain of “Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers?” He’s depicted as an embittered one-time child actor who “got old,” when of course, Peter Pan is “the boy who wouldn’t grow up.” Peter — voiced by comic villain par excellence Will Arnett — is having his revenge on the system (aka Disney) by kidnapping and enslaving (or worse) cartoon characters in a movie the fans aren’t shy about referring to as both a “Rangers” “reboot” and/or a “sequel to ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'”
Were screenwriters Dan Gregor and Doug Mand putting one by The Mouse by making a deep-dive dig at Disney’s treatment of the voice of the original Peter Pan, Bobby Driscoll? As those deep into Disneyana know, Unsentimental Uncle Walt disposed of Driscoll, who drifted into drugs and died at 31, one of the more sad and infamous “former child star” stories in Hollywood history.
Gregor and Mand had to know, right? As online fans, who by and large endorsed the film, debate minutia like the decision to show which biologically-incompatible cartoon characters are shown to have produced offspring (“They had SEX!”), and obsess over the scores upon scores of non-Disney characters to make appearances (without being given a single funny thing to do, as I noted in my review), they’re also asking that question.
Maybe they didn’t. When I covered all things Disney — which meant reading and reviewing every new Disney biography or “tell all” to come out of that World — for the Orlando newspaper, I recall running across the Driscoll story. Uncle Walt was only sentimental about his “Nine Old Men,” the animators who crossed a picket line and helped him keep the studio running during labor strife at the House that Mickey Built in the 1940s.
Everybody else was disposable, used and tossed aside. Some of these people sued as Walt’s heirs and their company exploited their work further as TV and then the video revolution gave new value to that back catalog.
So Driscoll’s story is sad but typical, and maybe it’s a bit tasteless to do that to poor Peter in a movie, but it is what it is. Driscoll never came to my mind while watching “Rescue Rangers,” maybe Mand and Gregor forgot about him, too. And as “Peter Pan Syndrome” and the like have entered common currency, it’s possible the writers didn’t know or recall this story. Expecting today’s generation of Disney execs to know anything about the operation pre Pixar is laughable.
Like me and anybody who didn’t grow up with the 1990s TV series, that would have slipped right by them.
My guess is that the bigger jab is at fans — now in their 30s or older — still clinging to entertainment from their childhood, maintaining a stake in something that was never meant to be all that sophisticated. The “Darkwing Duck/Animaniacs” generation should be able to take a joke, and judging from the fan reaction to the film, they can.
I still say the bigger crime is casting all these characters and doing little or nothing funny with them, putting comic John Mulaney in a co-starring role and hanging him out to dry.
Has it really been 25 years since “In & Out” came, uh, “out?”
Kevin Kline won an Oscar for other work, but hell’s bells, he was never funnier than in this Paul Rudnick farce.
Debbie Reynolds playing his Mom, Joan Cusack melting down at the wedding that never was to be, conservative icon and future reverse mortgage hustler Tom Selleck normalizing gay life for a shocked, reactionary fanbase?
By the way, Selleck? The funniest he would ever be, right here in this little compact 90 minute romp that didn’t so much change America as reflect a change.
Twenty-five years in automotive and boat terms means you get a “classic” or “antique” license plate or registration. Guess what? “In & Out” is a classic, in every variation of the word.
Watching it now, it feels quaint — a time capsule of the late ’90s, its prejudices, stereotypes and worth-lampooning gay cliches. But what makes it a classic is the fact that it still plays. It’s still hilarious, and at times, just joyous to sit through.
I remember gathering with my fellow critics for a lower East Side, NY screening of the movie on the weekend it was previewed and junketed (cast gathered at a tony NYC hotel for interviews with the press). A mostly-gay and defiantly New York audience — plus critics from “the provinces” — roared the roof off at screenwriter and Premiere Magazine humor columnist Paul Rudnick’s every-gay-stereotype jabbing script, at Kline and Selleck and Reynolds doing the droll “Honey, I knew” mom thing and Cusack as the would-be bride and last to know and Ernie Sabella (Pumba in the original animated “Lion King”) starting a brawl with “Streisand is OVERrated.”
Oh. My. God.
Yes, it was a more innocent time, of show tunes jokes and “real men don’t dance” jabs and “Well, if you dress well and have good manners and a genteel sensibility and love show tunes you must be gay” messaging you could never get away with today. Never ever. Ever.
The story was inspired by Tom Hanks’ “Philadelphia” Oscar speech, “outing” his beloved acting teacher. Here, the “outer” is gauche and dopey but well-meaning former student Cameron, played with unironic perfection by Matt Dillon.
Kline is Howard Brackett, the small town drama teacher — about to marry — who sees this on TV (with his fiance) and kind of loses his mind.
Cusack plays the long-patient fiance, Bob Newhart the not-all-that-tolerant school principal.
Selleck rolls into town as a smug, smirking big-city-sophisticate/TV reporter who milks this story for all that it’s worth, perhaps with “an agenda” all his own. Howard sees through him.
“Here, I’ll give you your headline! Howard Brackett is a big homo-queer-Mary-sissy man. He just came out at his big church wedding. Martha Stewart is furious!“
Sage, down-to-Earth character actor Wilford Brimley’s presence, playing the loving father of the outed gay Howard, speaks volumes about where we were as a country in 1997. It was time for a mainstream comedy to run with this, time for America to accept the obvious.
Needless to say, all heck breaks out in the film at this disruption — Howard protesting too much, the town recoiling and pondering and then kind of shrugging its shoulders in a way that brings tears to this day.
And damned if that Frank Oz doesn’t channel the “screwball” masters of the past as slapstick, silly and social commentary all boil over in a bubbly farce that only lets up for us to take a breath. “In & Out” rarely wastes a minute of screen time, and in one last “on-the-nose” touch gives The Village People the last word in the last scene.
Damn.
Twenty five years! Somebody should throw a party. Not in Florida, where I live, of course. Il Duce’s d-bag descendant would stamp his little feet in fascist “Don’t say GAY” fury.
“What are we all so afraid of?” would have him bursting another vein. Or into tears, the big silly. Ok, the runty and “overcompensating” silly.
For the rest of us, this now-officially-a-classic film is a reminder and a question reopened for America to answer.
Do we really want to go back to a time before “In & Out?” Will we let the most ignorant, backward and bigoted among us ordain it?
Rating: PG-13, profanity, adult subject matter
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, Debbie Reynolds, Tom Selleck, Bob Newhart, Matt Dillon, Ernie Sabella and Wilford Brimley.
Credits: Directed by Frank Oz, scripted by Paul Rudnick. A Paramount release on Amazon, virtually any streaming service you can name
The closing image of “We Feed People, Ron Howard’s uplifting documentary about Chef José Andrés and the righteous work he and the non-governmental-organization charity he helped found, World Central Kitchen, is a kicker, one of documentary cinema’s great story-in-a-single-shot punchlines.
The vehicle the Spanish born D.C. restaurateur is driving and talking about his work in — on this occasion, getting food to people locked-down by COVID — sputters and quits.
“Oh s–t!” the gregarious Andrés bellows. “We ran out of gas!”
Driving on “e” for “four hours” will do that, he admits as he lights up a cigar and decides what to do next. He’s so into the work he’s pioneered, showing up in disaster zones and feeding the masses, “making sure food is an agent of change,” talking up the WCK, that he forgot to gas up.
“Chefs operate in chaos” his fellow WCK team members have warned us. We’ve seen enough Gordon Ramsay and “Iron Chef” TV shows to know that already. Here. an empty gas tank is just another chaotic obstacle to overcome.
Starting 12 years ago with the Haitian earthquake, the beloved celebrity chef turned his intense focus on hunger, not just haute cuisine. He kept his charity’s organizing principle simple.
“People are hungry” in these extreme situations. “You cook. You feed them.”
“We Feed People” follows Andrés and his staff through their steep-learning curve. They showed up in Haiti with no plan, just a little cash and a notion of what was required to get a lot of people fed, and quickly. Andrés laughs at his Michelin star ego being put in check when the smiling Haitian women helping him cook let him know that he was fancy-chef’s-hat overthinking his treatment of local ingredients. WCK had to master cooking “what the locals would love to eat” in every new situation.
So maybe that Catalan sailor’s stew will work here, or maybe beans pureed the Haitian way would better comfort the shellshocked survivors.
He maxed out his credit cards buying food, “worrying about paying for it (through donations) later,” in battling the “botched response” to the Puerto Rican crisis brought on by Hurricane Maria. But there, he and his team figured out how to network chef-to-local-chef, cook-to-cook, to find big kitchens still operational and food trucks that could be brought in to cook the ingredients they helped him source all over the ravaged island.
At a volcano in Guatemala, another hurricane in the Bahamas, dealing with COVID shortages at Navajo Indian reservations and helping to feed migrant farm workers during the pandemic, we see WCK team members pitching in with, and asking for or giving assistance to the Red Cross (“the big brother in natural disaster relief,” Andrés calls them, not in an Orwellian way), the Salvation Army and the Federal Emergency Managements Agency (FEMA).
FEMA officials under the disgraced former president Trump tried to label Andrés a “hustler” working for profit there, which gets his back up. No, he’s not taking a penny.
He loses his temper, now and again, at disorganization or team members who ignore the lessons of earlier disasters and might, he fears, start a food riot.
Mostly though, Andrés bubbles over with enthusiasm, leading like a cheerleader with his sleeves rolled-up, supervising the cooking himself.
“You want a plate?” he asks small boys near one disaster kitchen site. “Come on. I cook it. It’s good!”
He ‘s just eschews the name “chef,” although everybody on his team can sound like a loyal kitchen crew, with their “Yes, chef” responses to his orders. To strangers he’s working with or serving who don’t recognize the garrulous man with a film crew following him, he’s just José
“I love the word ‘cook,‘” he says. In Spanish, “‘cocinero’ is a very romantic image — on the stove, with the fire.”
And for all the widening efforts of WCK — working towards “empowering local” businesses and cooks with better access to food, all the inspiration he took from mentor Robert Eggers, who ran the D.C. soup kitchen where Andrés, all the demands of family and celebrity and “business,” that’s the picture that emerges of the only real rival to Dolly Parton among America’s most righteous and famous.
He’s a cook. You’re hungry? Let’s see what we can whip up for you — 500,000 of you a day, in Puerto Rico at one point.
But maybe leave somebody else in charge of gassing up.
Rating: some profanity
Cast: José Andrés, Maisie Wilhelm, Nate Mook, Joe Biden, many others
Credits: Directed by Ron Howard. A National Geographic release (May 27 on Disney+, NatGeo.com)
For those keeping score at home, I called it. Netflix getting into the Victoria Justice business was a smart play for both parties. Give her suitable, wholesome, flirty and sassy parts and she’ll deliver and Netflix will be the richer for it.
“A Perfect Pairing” is a nice step up from her first film for Netflix (“Afterlife of the Party”) and a big step in the right direction for fixing her Hallmarkish brand with the streaming service.
The Doris Day of Netflix is a perky, quick-quipping young Latina.
In “Pairing,” she plays a wine broker, someone who lines up wineries for her importing firm and lands contracts with tony restaurants to be their exclusive supplier. Lola may not run the place, but even the insufferable boss (Craig Horner) has to see her as his star. Lovelorn Lola — she’s divorced — will go to great extremes to close a deal.
She’s tipped about an Australian “hobby” winery owned by a Fortune 500 CEO that may be ready for the big time, and is ready to pull the trigger when a back-stabbing colleague (Lucy Durek) steals her thunder. The boss just smirks at this “lesson learned.” Cue Lola’s quit-in-front-of-the-entire-office “Norma Rae” speech.
“I would rather sell margueritas in a can at a suburban SEVEN ELEVEN than spend another minute with you!”
She’ll set up her own business, play up her heritage and use her contacts and “moxie” to make Salud Imports a success. That means she’ll gamble on an AirBnB visit to Oz to be near enough to the elusive Hazel Vaughn (Samantha Cain) to make her pitch.
That elaborate set-up is just here to send Victoria Justice Down Under, park her on remote (but verdant and mountainous) Waratah sheep station, where she ends up having to hire on as a “jillaroo,” a stockhand “because we don’t have cowboys in Australia.”
Hunky Max (AdamDemos) runs the place and he’s one jackaroo short. As it is one of the businesses CEO Hazel owns, a family ranch where she takes a sabbatical every year, Lola shifts from tourist who just made a failed pitch to the boss, to the female stockhand, a “jillaroo,” who’ll help them get through shearing season.
“I pay attention,” she declares. She’ll do the “grunt work, hard yakka,” because she does not quit and “I do not fail.”
We’ll see about that.
Screenwriters Hilary Galanoy and Elizabeth Hackett — team “Falling Inn Love” and “Love Guaranteed”– may be no one’s idea of the new Nichols and May. But they give Justice the situations, and possibly even the funny lines — although Justice makes the best stuff sound improvised — to succeed.
Lola instantly attempts a livestock ranch no-no. She wants to name the sheep.
A feel-good movie of the Hallmark Channel persuasion — and that’s all this ever aims to be — only requires good looking and compatible leads, a lovely location and in this case, lots of local color in the form of Oz folkways and Oz slang
Lola must learn her “blunnies” (boots) from her “barneys” (bar fight), what it means to be “up the duff” (pregnant, used re: sheep) and how to endure the local cuisine.
“What exactly IS Vegamite?”
Justice makes a fine fish out of water, generating just enough PG-13 lust at the shirtless Max, whose superpower is a ready supply of inspirational aphorisms.
“When it comes to hard work, some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses and some don’t turn up at all.”
I don’t know, maybe it’s watching two little girls grow up adoring”Victorious” and recognizing comic timing that wouldn’t abandon her as an adult that has me rooting for Justice. There’s a niche she fills here, one that Netflix was wise to go after — chaste, low-cost Hallmark Channel romances.
“A Perfect Pairing” does exactly what a simple feel-good romance should do, and Justice gives us a heroine worth rooting for. The “low hanging fruit” jokes land, and the situations — a campfire sing-along, a bar dance-and-sing-along to Aussie band Jet’s one-hit “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” followed by a boozy “barney” — adorably embed Justice with amusing Oz cliches.
It’s not that ambitious, but it’s perfectly executed by Justice, her little-known supporting cast and veteran TV director (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) Stuart McDonald.
I’d say it’s good enough that maybe Ms. Justice can start a little arm-twisting — get her studio to spend a little more on writers, co-stars, etc. That’s how Doris did it.
If they’re smart, they’ll see this “Perfect Pairing” as the first of many.
Rating: TV-14, alcohol, sheep dung gags
Cast: Victoria Justice, Adam Demos, Luca Asta Sardelis, Natalie Abbott, Emily Harea, Antonio Alvarez, Lucy Durek, and Samantha Cain.
Credits: Directed by Stuart McDonald, scripted by Hilary Galanoy and Elizabeth Hackett. A Netflix release.
Making a better sequel did not allow the second “DowntonAbbey” movie to overcome COVID depressed turnout, as “Downton Abbey: ANewEra” managed a robust $18 million opening weekend, down from the first big screen treatment of the BBC/PBS soap opera.
The first “Downton” earned $31 million when it opened in a pandemic free era, hot on the end of the TV series.
That means “Doctor Strange” and his “Multiverse” win one more weekend before “Top Gun” shoots him down. Another $27-28 million will have been added to its tally by midnight Sunday.
“The Bad Guys” are biting off another $5 million+, clearing $75, fated to fall short of $100 before “Buzz Lightyear” takes down everybody in June.
“Sonic 2” is still making bank, adding nearly $4 more this weekend.
“Men,” the latest from A24, only managed $3.5, just enough to overcome the latest weekend take of the studio’s biggest performer ever. “Everything Everywhere All At Once” added another $3, clearing the $50 million mark – $52 by midnight Sunday.
Everyone’s viewing tolerance is different. Everyone has a different limit, how long she or he or we will sit through a streaming series, waiting for something — ANYthing — interesting to happen.
I got three hours into the new Amazon series “Night Sky” by first-time series creator Holden Miller before I took an irritated break to start this review.
It’s a series pitched to critics with a long string of “Do Not Reveal” edicts about its plot particulars. Here’s what they’re worried about.
This is a low-heat, flat-toned, limited effects science fiction Big Secret mystery movie whose “streaming series” stretchmarks show in every damned episode. As that’s a common complaint I have of drip-drip-drip-cliffhanger streaming storytelling, I am obliged to watch more just to see if anybody involved gets to the point, or again ANYthing interesting.
The series’ saving grace is casting Oscar winners Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons as an old and getting infirm/forgetful couple in small town Illinois, people who are “special” because of their secret. Tucked away in a tunnel beneath their tool shed on the outskirts of Farnsworth (the inventor of TV) Illinois is a futuristic observation room, a glimpse of the cosmus.
But what they’re about to find out is that it’s some sort of ancient portal, allowing travel in space and perhaps in time.
That’s a little vague for much of the series, as our “saving grace” couple are joined by an ever-growing crew of characters which require shifts in points of view. Among those is a younger version of Irene and Franklin.
There are plot threads that have a hint of Kurt Vonnegut about them, but the Big Secret –the series’ sole hook — is never remotely that sophisticated. The dialogue never rises up to the level of faux profound.
“I knew it was a sex dungeon” is as witty as this stiff gets.
The mother and daughter in the Argentine Andes (Julieta Zylberberg, Rocio Hernandez) are guardians of another ancient portal inside an old chapel. Well, the mother is. The daughter’s about to find out some things. Elderly Irene and Franklin’s grad school granddaughter (Kiah McKirnan) has her own story, and Irene and Franklin’s annoying and nosey new neighbor Byron (Adam Bartley) is spending too much time trying to figure out the standoffish couple next door. As I type this, another point-of-view has been introduced, that of a nursing home nurse (Beth Lacke) with a temper and a grudge.
As a stranger (Chai Hansen) pleading “amnesia” turns up in Franklin and Irene’s tunnel, it’s safe to assume his arrival and quest has a back story that must be filled in, too. First, Irene has to read a little W.H. Auden him to help him recover.
“Jude” seems not at home in this world.
All these characters, all this “mystery” and the only thing that registers are our stars and leading characters, facing a shrinking and uncertain future, grieving over what they’ve lost but still losing themselves on their trips underground to gaze upon “the Night Sky.”
In acting terms, Spacek plays Irene as curious, concerned, caring and enfeebled. Simmons’ Franklin is doting with her, crusty and standoffish with most others. That’s all well and good, but it contributes to the flat tone of this action-starved/slow-starting/characters-adding exercise in time sucking.
There’s barely a half-assed effort to “explain” what’s going on, the why and how and to what purpose. Any “tech” digressions are more to tease things out than to drive this towards “answers,” a solution and the ever-elusive conclusion.
The Argentine characters speak English in Argentina, Spanish to each other elsewhere, an example of a show with no real “rules,” or efforts to follow them.
The “payoffs” to all this start to pay off in episode five, but calling those a letdown would give letdowns a bad name. The flashbacks merely fill in little pieces of backstory and are passed along as begrudgingly as everything else in this teasing “spoiler alert” without the spoilers.
I adore Spacek and Simmons, but not enough to sit through that final two hours of “Night Sky,” expecting a miracle.
Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity
Cast: Sissy Spacek, J.K. Simmons, Chai Hansen, Kiah McKirnan, Julieta Zylberberg, Rocio Hernandez and Adam Bartley.
Credits: Created by Holden Miller. An Amazon release.
Movie Nation 