“The Babysitter: Killer Queen” is a sequel to the teen death-cult comedy “The Babysitter,” which all the cool kids gathered round the TV to “Netflix” back in 2017.
The sequel, in which finding fresh slasher comedy laughs shows, first scene to last, isn’t anything to skip (home) school for.
And there’s just enough down time, –in between the frenetic butchery, manic off-color one-liners, teens behaving badly, teachers cursing students and parents taking bong hits while they play VR “Halo” — to ponder the imponderable.
McG? What HAPPENED to you, man?
Granted, in this “post-director” filmmaking environment, where you’re either a legend or just this week’s hack who talks a good game and works cheap (Russo Brothers, cough cough), just finding steady work is a challenge.
But McG, real name Joseph McGinty Nicol, directed “We Are Marshall.” He survived the Cameron/Lucy/Drew “Charlie’s Angels” franchise (barely). He even got to do a “Terminator” sequel.
And here he is, just a couple of years after getting that AARP card in the mail, producing and directed a little TV here and there and making disposable shlock-shock comedies for Netflix.
“Killer Queen” has our once-babysat fraidy-cat Cole (Judah Lewis) coping with high school bullies, parents (Leslie Bibb, Ken Marino) who never believed his babysitter was mistress of a Devil Book cult. The only “friend” who could verify the events of that awful, blood-stained night they survived two years ago is Mel (Emily Alyn Lind), the school hottie who refuses to ding her rep by confirming his worst nightmare was true.
As consolation, she invites him to a Teens Gone Wild houseboat party down on Lake Mead or Lake Powell (in the desert). And damned if the SAME murderous things go down, with many of the same villains. He and we are puzzled when Allison (Bella Thorne), Sonya (Hana Mae Lee) and John (Andrew Bachelor), among others, show up for more ritualistic “play.” Didn’t we see Allison’s head explode in a shotgun blast last time out?
“What can I say? The Devil gives good head!”
Maybe the new Goth girl, fresh from “juvie” and named “Phoebe” (Jenna Ortega) can help.
Every joke is a piece of low-hanging fruit, every gag sophomoric, every “zinger” a dated bit of teen-friendly innuendo.
Melanie? She’s “DTF,” her stoner-Dad (Chris Wylde) cracks. “Ditches (school) Thursday and Fridays.”
Some of the effects are OK, and the night shots around the lake show some sophistication.
But the script is utter crap, the performances pro forma and the “threat” even sillier, if bloodier, than it was last time around.
The romance and endless possibilities of a motorcycle create many an armchair adventurer. But if you’ve got the bike, the time and the yen for “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” why not think big?
“Long Way Up” is the third epic motorcycle trip/travelogue undertaken by avid cyclists and longtime actor friends Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman.
After “Long Way Round” (2004) took them around the world, across Europe, Siberia and North America, and “Long Way Down” (2007) saw them venture from Scotland to South Africa, they figured they’d never get around to one last super-long trip.
McGregor told me as much when I interviewed him as his film “Salmon Fishing in Yemen” came out, back in 2011.
But circumstances changed, McGregor’s family life blew-up thanks to a very public affair with a co-star, and his turn in “Fargo” — where he met said co-star — gave him the luxury of another months-long odyssey. So he and Boorman, fresh off a couple of hospital-stays due to bike accidents, took a pre-Pandemic ramble from Tierra del Fuego, on the bottom tip of South America, to Los Angeles, where McGregor now makes his home.
Such a trip killed Classic “Top Gear,” but Boorman and McGregor are such charmers you can’t imagine a Jeremy Clarkson-style international Argentine incident, complete with BBC coverup, this time round.
For their latest “Long Way,” the lads would be riding American metal — Harley-Davidson motorcycles, with Detroit-built custom trucks hauling the support team. The hook? The Harleys are electric prototypes, and the trucks are Rivian electric pick-ups.
This ride, with two 50ish dads, would be about the adventure, the scenery, meeting and sampling new cultures and new cuisines. As always. But it’d also be about the greener future. And part of the adventure would be the added degree of difficulty steering electric vehicles through corners of the world where they haven’t caught on and installed charging stations.
No wheelies and vigorous off-roading for the lads. Their 100-150 mile range bikes would turn them into hyper-milers.
In the dozen years since their African trek, tiny GoPro style cameras on helmets and tiny camera drones have become all the rage. The footage is a lot more varied, lots of aerial shots. And the quiet electric bikes mean they can chat at-will while riding.
They’re always ooohing and aaaahhhing over the scenery, the states of the roads, glaciers and penguins, llamas and deserts, rainforests and volcanoes of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Occasionally, the dire state of their battery range dominates the conversation.
Ewan even sings and plays the guitar he buys en route — “Oh we’re ridin’ on a bike that doesn’t take no gas…I got the border blues, the border blues.”
“Long Way Up” shows us their “steep learning curve,” coping with battery range issues in the bitter cold southern South American winter, figuring out recharging in places where their support companies — Harley and Rivian — didn’t get charging stations installed (and they installed quite a few along the way), charming closed out-of-season hotels and hostels into reopening, it’s basically a nostalgic revisiting of the earlier quests’ Greatest Hits.
A Ewan McGregor movie is showing in one pub they stop in. There’s even a Chilean family that takes them in and feeds Charlie and Ewan, who mistakenly thought their house was an electronics business. That’s the first place somebody “makes” Ewan.
“La Isla,” the man says (“The Island”), in Spanish to his family, recognizing the star. Good thing Ewan’s Spanish is pretty bad at that stage of the trip. Reminding an actor of an infamous bomb isn’t good form — in Scotland, anyway.
Mobbed in Machu Picchu, and Ecuador, McGregor reminds us he’s a good sport.
National parks, seaside drives, deserts crossed, a UNICEF children’s shelter in Nicaragua — they even find themselves using local guides to dodge gang activity and “keep a low profile” in in Guatemala and Mexico.
It’s just that “Everybody that wants a selfie lets the world know where we are,” McGregor shrugs.
Many episodes and incidents remind one of why it takes a good-sized support team to undertake “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” on the “Blue Highways” of the less-developed world. A backup generator truck when the local power supply fails, an advance team to hold a ferry here and there, they even buy buses to fix up and use as campers for “night-driving” in dangerous Guatemala and Mexico.
The “Dad joke” nature of the trip slyly sneaks in here and there. Suffering the aftereffects of spicy food, Ewan, running his bike until the juice is gone — repeatedly, at first — Charley horsing around, just a wee bit, even though he’s coming off two bad accidents and long recoveries. Their epic adventure on bikes is more sweetly nostalgic this time round.
McGregor is much more the center of this trek, with Boorman more in the background. But the changes in McGregor’s personal life aren’t addressed in the least, which considering the “family” focus of the first two, leaves that as an elephant in the room. This isn’t “that kind” of friendship. No buddy bonding on-camera confessionals, or even fake ones of the type Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon serve up in their “The Trip” movies.
The arrival of McGregor’s adopted Mongolian daughter for part of a journey seems like a desperate and obvious effort to address that gap without doing anything of the sort. For a while, at least, his other kids wanted nothing to do with him.
Still, it’s a lovely travelogue – 13 countries worth. Hyper-miling to do it with electric bikes adds bits of suspense and touches of drama.
For those of us who can do math, noting how few miles they’re able to pile up in the bitter winter cold of southern South America, 13,000 miles in 100 days does start to seem like a ride-too-far.
But that’s a reason to stick around to the end, isn’t it?
MPAA Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman.
Credits: Directed by David Alexanian and Russ Malkin. An Apple TV+ release (premiering Sept. 18)
I loved “The Long Way Round,” and “The Long Way Down,” two epic motorcycle road trips undertaken by actor pals Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman (son of the great director John “Deliverance” Boorman).
It’s been 13 years since the second trip, and now the lads have gone green and are riding from Tierra Del Fuego to LA on electric Harley Davidsons.
The pansies should go to Point Barrow, Alaska, but don’t tell them that.
I’m a bicycle not a motorcycle guy, but I can’t miss this Apple + TV (Sept 17) series (10 parts) because I’ve missed Ewan saying “Charlie Booooooooorman.”
McGregor and I talked about the series the last time I interviewed him, and he didn’t think they’d be nimble and unfettered enough to do another, due to their advancing years and obligations.
Who would have suspected that the perfect “whodunit” title would turn up on a Korean thriller?
“Killed My Wife (Anaereul Jukyessda)” is a guilty, sinking suspicion, a question and in the end an answer to a mystery, cryptically served-up in a solid genre thriller that keeps you guessing, thanks at least in part to a bit of cheating on the part of the filmmaker.
It opens with a death in a darkened apartment. Drops of blood hit the floor, followed by the bleeding woman it was coming from.
The cops get word, and in the morning they check in with the victim’s husband. Jeong-ho (Lee Si-eon) is living in another apartment, sleeping one off. He was so drunk last night he has no idea what he did or where. He’s pretty sure he didn’t kill his wife, though.
The veteran detective (Ahn Nae-sang) offers up “Usually the victim knows” the person who killed her, which gets Jeong-ho’s back up.
Then we see his shirt. It’s bloody. The cop sees it. Jeong-ho is the last to notice. He protests his innocence, and damned if a knife doesn’t fall out of his jacket. Before we know it, the cop has the cuffs out but Jeong-ho is quicker with the frying pan.
And he’s off, on a mad dash to sober-up, reconstruct the previous night and construct an iron clad alibi.
We can’t help but notice he doesn’t take even a moment to mourn. We can’t miss that the friend he was with, bar-hopping, knows an awful lot of his business — a job loss that Jeong-ho kept from his wife, money problems, a “loan shark.”
The cop, it turns out, was recently demoted. He’s too embarrassed to admit he got jumped “by a bum,” and when he comes across money at the crime scene, he grabs it.
What’s HIS story? Ten or so minutes in, and we’re piling up suspects. Poor Jeong-ho doesn’t know whether to feel guilty, how guilty to feel or where to go next as he reconstructs a night that ended with his wife dead on her apartment floor.
Gangs, teen punks, a friendly barmaid, a karaoke bar, CCTV footage and other wrinkles will work their way into our puzzle-solving as we, Jeong-ho and the cops try to reason out which of the myriad suspects had motive, access and no alibi on the night in question.
Lee Si-eon does a lovely job of suggesting guilt-ridden befuddlement, a man with a black-out drunk drinking problem that his wife was exhausted from coping with, and a man with debts which just might have gotten his wife killed.
Ahn Nae-sang ensures that Det. Choi is another mystery. Why was he demoted? How does he get away with slapping around younger cops, and is he really motivated to catch Jeong-ho, and if so, why?
Writer-director Kim Ha-ra doesn’t always play fair with the clues, but masterfully works in red herrings that make us suspect almost everybody introduced as a potential killer.
In addition to the “cheating” with the clues, “Killed My Wife” moves along in fits and starts, losing its urgency, making one wonder how long a suspect could walk the streets after Korean cops finger him and unleash the country’s vast CCTV network on hunting him down.
It’s still a solid and most engrossing entry in the whodunit genre, one Hollywood has been content to tread water in for years and years.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse
Cast: Lee Si-eon, Ahn Nae-sang, Seo Ji-young
Credits: Written and directed by Kim Ha-ra. A Blue Fox release.
“Antebellum” is a gorgeously-shot but dawdling and ditzy parable on race and “the patriarchy,” told in three acts.
First-time feature writer/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz make the most of their Big Chance, opening their film with an impressive-if-not-quite-dazzling five minute tracking shot, lighting and framing their recreations of the Civil War South with “Gone With the Wind” Technicolor care.
But as screenwriters, their First Best Destiny might be keeping a script doctor on speed dial. Their “mystery” isn’t nearly mysterious enough. And that three act structure makes for a grim, distressing and lumbering opening, a tense and bloody finale and a middle act — the one set in the modern day that “explains” what’s going on — that is as straight-up hackwork, a Tyler Perry fashion show meant to add dread but where rolling one’s eyes is the only proper response.
“Ah often PONDER the DEPTHS of yo’loyalty,” he purrs, as he metes out torture that he calls “punishment.”
Somehow, “Eden” has to escape this, and we get hints of how she might affect that get-away, here and there.
But there’s something very strange about this plantation. It’s in the cotton fields, and what’s done with the crop. It’s in the way there’s a full company of Confederate soldiers, some with repeating rifles, stand guard. They like to march by torchlight.
“Blood and soil,” they chant, just like the Nazis in Charlottesville and your average Proud Boys/Trump rally.
Veronica (Monáe) awakens from this nightmare in her posh house, with her loving husband and adorable little girl. Her life as an author is modern and scheduled — from her speeches, book-signings and TV appearances debating right wing Congressmen to her personalized yoga instruction.Â
But there’s danger in that TV debate, and menace in the drawled interrogation of a video call from this odd David Duke blonde “journalist” (Jena Malone).
Never you mind. Veronica’s “advice to the lovelorn” author pal (Gabourey Sidibe) shows up, so let the fashion show, tsunami of circle-jerk compliments and slang and flashy-fleshy girls-night-out begin.
What we see here and hear in the best parts of “Antebellum” are horrific and as topical as the evergreen William Faulkner quote that opens the film.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Black lives then and Black lives now are perceived as a threat by some, a threat worthy of violence.
But this isn’t a horror movie, isn’t a work of speculative fiction and doesn’t have much “Get Out” in it, which is precisely the way it’s been sold since it was announced.
The middle act kills the “thrills” in “thriller.”
It’s lightly-preachy, and the sermon is on point. The violence is shocking and personal.
Monáe is fine as the lead, charismatic even when you feel the script is letting her down — arch dialogue, situations as obvious plot devices. Sidibe is playing a caricature of the “Byeeeee– good MORN-tink” Black girlfriend in a hundred other films, Kiersey Clemons is like most of the supporting cast — barely in it — and Malone is a drawling cartoon.
The screenplay’s artifice is too obvious. How you take it and take to it comes down to one image, the closest you’ll get to a “spoiler” in this review — a cell phone in a saddlebag.
Sometimes the ridiculous, over-the-top and overly articulate “gentility” of Deep South speech is there for a reason, and isn’t the product of some misguided Brit whose only experience of the dialect has been old Hollywood movies.
Sometimes, the parable gets lost in peripherals — making every shot perfect, making every female character a clothes horse.
And sometimes the hype isn’t appreciated because it’s been a bait and switch all along.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, language, and sexual references
Cast: Janelle Monáe, Jena Malone, Gabourey Sidibe, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, Eric Lange and Tongayi Chirisa.
Credits: Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. A Lionsgate release.
“Blow up your TV,” John Prine sang, in one of his most famously whimsical songs, an early plea for abandoning media and focusing on what’s personal and important. “Throw away your paper.”
Half a century later, “media” is more insidious and omnipresent than ever. It’s in every person’s pocket, a mere click away — monitoring, enticing, persuading and manipulating.
And John Prine? He’s dead thanks to a pandemic whose impact has been magnified by our devices’ ability to prey on our doubts, manipulate our choices and magnify our foibles.
Those foibles are manifested in a “leader” who represents the very worst impulses in our culture but whose crimes fall on deaf ears to social-media-manipulated lemmings in “media bubbles” of their/our own creation. Our lives and our very democracy teeter on the brink, thanks to the irresistible algorithms of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like, and the heartless, amoral and greedy technocrats who created all this and shrug off any responsibility for the crisis they’ve IPO’d into being.
“The Social Dilemma” is a very clever Netflix documentary that lays out the scope of the problem and the few real solutions for it in the words of scores of Silicon Valley insiders — ex-employees and honchos from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Firefox and their ilk.
It covers familiar ground, to anybody who’s seen or read of the “dopamine” rush that having a post shared or “liked” is engineered to deliver, the addictive qualities of the endless long-scrolling “feeds,” the “predictive” nature of “surveillance capitalism” where our Internet devices figure out what we like and are likely to want to buy or believe, and manipulate us by giving it to us.
In a flash, social media have created a world “where each person has his or her own reality,” we’re “2.7 billion (strong), each living in our own ‘Truman Show.'”
The anchor interview here is Tristan Harris, former Google “design ethicist” who left tech for a career as a TED Talk guru as “the conscience of Silicon Valley.” He remembers the “good things” this technology brought to the world, and frankly admits to “being naive about the dark flip-side of that coin.”
Many others echo those sentiments, and expand on them. And being insiders now outside “the beast” of Big Tech, they enlighten us on the “growth” that capitalism dictates that the companies need to survive, and break down the three “goals” of a Facebook, Twitter or what have you.
There’s the “Engagement Goal,” getting people to use your service, the “Growth Goal” where you and they persuade others to use it for that all-important exponential expansion in reach and influence, and the “advertising goal,” where you use those customers and what you know about them to sell to them.
A clever touch here is using actors to depict a family confronted with the addictive power of devices and social media (Skylar Gisondo is the most famous face in that group), illustrating the isolation, manipulation, relative deprivation (everybody else is having a better time/better life) that drives up suicide rates.
Just as clever? Showing us what’s going on inside “the cloud” or AI hive mind, with actors embodying the one-user-at-a-time attention that enables the algorithms to hook us and manipulate us. The face of this unseen, sinister force? Vincent Kartheiser of “Mad Men.”
As I say, a lot of this is material that’s been covered elsewhere. And the focus on only Silicon Valley insiders (with montages of news coverage, snippets of Congressional hearings) narrows the thinking to people who know the scope of the problem but can’t see the forest for the trees, when it comes to solutions.
And then VR expert, “computer philosopher” and Big Algorithm Jeremiah himself, Jaron Laniershows up and drops a take-away truth on us all.
The Internet used to be more like Wikipedia — a version of (reasonably) objective truth, presenting the same “facts” (crowd-sourced, edited) to every person who used it. Google came along and abandoned any obligation to objective “truth.” Your search via Google is manipulated by the geographic location where you search from, your prior prejudices as revealed by your search history, and by Google advertisers who get their “search results” a place of priority in your “results.”
Google is “not the truth, it’s telling you the truth it wants you to see.”
“Social Dilemma” is a good film, probably too little too late to play a role in saving democracy or healing a nation so divided half of it won’t do the most basic things to stop a pandemic. But there you are, and there we are.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements, disturbing/violent images and suggestive material
Cast: Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, Tim Kendall, Rashida Richardson, Jaron Lanier, Shoshona Zuboff, Skylar Gismodo, Kara Edwards and Vincent Kartheiser.
Credits: Directed by Jeff Orlowski, script by David Coombe, Vickie Davis and Jeff Orlowski A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:31
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It’s a thin line filmmakers must walk when depicting mental illness in a movie. The line is thinner when the genre you’re working in is a romance, one that flirts with being a romantic comedy. The risk is, that you’ll cross over into “cute,” and there’s nothing cute about being mentally ill, or coping with someone who is in your life.
The Aussie romance “I Met a Girl” doesn’t get into much trouble, in that regard. We meet our schizophrenic hero — Devon — just as he’s decided to forgo his pills and quaff a few. I mean, it’s his brother Nick’s wedding day and Devon’s written a song that he and his band, And They Said it Wouldn’t Last, are performing.
He wants to “be there,” right? The song is charming, and boy-band handsome Devon (Brenton Thwaites of the last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie) pulls it off with ebullience and talent.
But as they do, things go manically, violently wrong and Devon winds up in a hospital.
“I was twelve when I first hear the voices,” he narrates. We have our diagnosis, and the scope of Devon’s problem. Being beautiful and talented doesn’t inoculate you against schizophrenia.
Five years later, and he’s living with Nick (Joel Jackson) and his expectant, tolerant wife Olivia (Zahra Newman). But Devon is still dodging his pills, when he can. Manic episodes mean he can’t keep a job. Working at a pet store, he reacts to a born-bully/animal abusing kid by flipping out and freeing all the budgies.
He totes his guitar everywhere, but he can’t get the band back together.
“Time to grow up, mate,” they tell him.
And the two voices in his head prey on him when he’s unmedicated and having a bad day. Mr. Rocket is a superhero “protector” who pushes him into risks. Miss Needle is a Nurse Ratched menace, terrorizing him with injections, tormenting him over his failings.
They drive him up on a roof and off it.
Only he doesn’t die. He wakes up in a beautiful woman’s clawfoot tub. She “dragged” him there, she says. Her name is Lucy (Lily Sullivan of TV’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock”). She’s flirtatious, kind, open and direct.
“Like, were you trying to kill yourself?”
She has one of those glorious “only in the movies” flats that nobody whose employment is dressing up like Marilyn Monroe as a waitress for a ’50s themed diner. She drops everything she’s doing to spend the day with Devon, and they fall in love in a flash.
We think it long before he says it. “It’s like I’ve dreamt you.”
Is she all in his head, a fantasy that his mind has created to fill one of the many voids in his life? We’ll know when joins Nick and Devon for dinner. Only she doesn’t show up.
Her flat is empty. And real-estate agent Nick, with a baby on the way, has no patience for Devon’s mad fantasy.
“She’s as real as you and I” isn’t convincing.
But Devon has a clue, and on or off his meds, he’s going to pursue it. He’ll leave Perth and cross Australia to Sydney and find his Lucy. And on or off his meds, he’ll have adventures all along the way.
Filmmakers Luke Eve and Glen Dolman, Aussie TV veterans, come up with a few cute episodes for Devon’s trek, and a few harrowing moments as his demons literally chase him cross country, with frantic Nick trying to figure out where his crazy kid brother’s gone.
Visualizing Devon’s illness — with actors playing his two “voices” — is a lot less scary than aurally simulating what’s going on in his head. But taking care to never let us forget the seriousness of his condition shortchanges the “cute” encounters he has on his “road comedy” journey.
Meeting someone just like himself is a plus, but the other meetings are hit and miss.
Thwaites, who apparently does his own singing, has to carry the picture with his charm, and he almost does. He’s charismatic and cute and doe-eyed in his scenes with Sullivan, who seems older (she isn’t), world weary and wiser.
The players give “I Met a Girl” a warm and fuzzy romantic lilt. But the best one can say for the script is that it gives the charming stars a nice moment or two, and that it generally doesn’t fall for the “Love can cure what ails you” mental health rom-com trap.
Every now and then? Sure. But “generally,” no. Take your meds and hope for the best. Male wish fulfillment fantasy girlfriends are only in the movies.
MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, violence
Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Lily Sullivan, Joel Jackson, Zahra Newman
Credits: Directed by Luke Eve, script by Glen Dolman. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Sometimes you wonder how a movie with a couple of “names” in it got past you. And everybody else.
“A Girl Like Grace” is a 2015 teen drama starring Ryan Destiny, who went on to do Fox’s “Star” TV series, with Raven-Symone and Meagan Good in top line supporting roles.
It’s about bullying and its consequences. So you’d think it’d conjure up a little buzz.
What held it back? The producers claim a PG-13 rating, even though there’s a gang rape scene in it, sexual content and drug abuse. Did the MPAA ever even look at it?
Maybe the notion of screen veteran Meagan Good, playing a former Vegas dancer whose sister killed herself, coming home and buddying up to her late sibling’s high school BFF-with-benefits, Grace, was the hard sell. Good was 34 when she made this, and the idea of a drug-loving, loose-living stripper palling around with a girl half her age feels…off.
Ah, but that’s nothing to seeing Raven-Symone, a high-mileage 30 year-old (then) playing the meanest mean girl of all at the unnamed (Gulfport, Miss.) high school where all this takes place. Jayzus.
“Grace” is a grim, brooding gay girl’s coming-of-age drama about a would-be writer,a seemingly college-bound teen who withdraws into her shell after her bullied friend Andrea (Paige Hurd) kills herself.
“Lazy” is what we label screenplays the lean on that most exhausted of screen shortcuts, voice-over narration. “Never ‘tell’ it if you can ‘show’ it,” they teach you in screenwriting classes. Amazing how few screenwriters even bother take a stab at dropping this tiresome crutch. Do we need to hear anything, in VO, after Grace (Destiny) tells us she was named that “to remind me of who I am?”
No. We do not.
Grace sulks through her life with a vain, short-tempered Haitian-American single mom (Garcelle Beauvais), a bombshell who plows through an Army regiment of lovers, looking for a man who will take care of her…uh them.
Grace is a high school senior, keeping her sadness to herself. Even the mean girls keep their distance. They don’t want Mean Queen Mary) Symone to break a hip, do they?
Sorry, last “She’s too old to be in this” crack.
Grace’s special pain is glimpsed in flashbacks, but explained to a new boy in school by one of the jocks.
“She won’t be cheering for OUR team,” he says, impressed at how subtle he’s being. The oher fellow wonders “Huh?”
Because “she’s on the OTHER team.” As in gay. As in she lost more than just a friend last summer.
The oddest invention in this is the arrival of Lisa (Good), home to “take care of my grandmother” but hellbent on making Grace her new “best friend.” Grace is abruptly yanked from her home and homework solitude and hurled into Lisa’s drama — sketchy boyfriend, drugs, “partying” with people far beyond “school night” curfews.
I don’t buy that dynamic at all, and that’s mainly due to Destiny’s performance. She plays one note for most of the movie, and so monotonously that when she cuts loose with Lisa and boys and drinking and whatnot, it seems wholly out of character.
Her sexuality climbs back up on the fence during this dive into hedonism. She’s a teen. They experiment. Fine.
It’s the ugliness that comes out of left field, the ugliness remembered from Andrea’s last days, the ugliness that screams “No WAY this was PG-13” that takes over the movie.
“A Girl Like Grace” plays like a picture built on compromises, edited into an endless parade of undeveloped loose ends. Grace’s “future,” hinted at by her Honors English class teacher? Her mother’s sudden bout of motherly concern? Grace’s writing?
She laments the “tears I cry inside, the misery of my own reproducing pain,” in voice-over. And maybe we grimace.
Not as much as when we see Raven-Symone lead a vampy cheer squad through a routine that looks more “Showgirls” than “Bring it On.”
Director and co-writer Ty Hodges, who plays a just-graduated friend, has a run of completed films that peaked in 2015. He hasn’t made a feature since.
Go figure.
MPAA Rating: PG-13? With drug abuse, teen drinking, sex and a gang rape scene? Sure.
Cast: Ryan Destiny, Garcelle Beauvais, Raven-Symone, Ty Hodges and Meagan Good.
Credits: Directed by Ty Hodges, script by Jacquin Deleon and Ty Hodges. A GVN release on Netflix.
A good romantic comedy is like a happy love affair. Even when our couple faces obstacles, they should feel “easy” to overcome, even if they aren’t. Even if every relationship requires work, we shouldn’t see the effort.
“Gossip Girl” veteran Natalie Krinsky’s “The Broken Hearts Gallery” is not without its charms — likable leads, amusing sidekicks (mostly), built around a cute conceit.
But the 110 minute running time is a dead giveaway that what should flow by breezily and happen without a strain are labored. Scenes that should play in shorthand are repeated, beaten to death to get across a point, and even the “cute” can feel forced.
That conceit? Lovelorn Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) keeps mementos from every failed relationship she’s ever had. And not just concert ticket stubs and photos, but a rubber ducky here, a retainer there. A bike tire? Espresso machine?
Her cluttered apartment is, her BFFs Amanda (Molly Gordon, funny) and Nadine (“Hamilton’s” Phillipa Soo, funnier) lament, “a cove of sorrows.” She is “a hoarder,” she is told, and not for the ony time. She needs to “Marie Kondo” her life, toss out that which does not “bring joy.”
“We do not SPEAK her name in this house!”
When Lucy gets dumped and loses her job in a posh New York art gallery on the same night early on in the film, we’re treated to the film’s “meet cute.” She drunkenly hops into a random Prius, which isn’t an Uber. And the nice-enough guy (Dacre Montgomery) driving it takes pity on her and takes her home.
Their banter is a lot of glib instant psychoanalysis — Lucy the “hoarder” vs. Nick the “minimalist.”
He’s cynical — “Everyone either leaves, disappoints or dies.”
She’s sentimental — “When love crumbles, how do you preserve its ruins?”
Turns out Nick is opening a boutique hotel, doing the work converting an old YMCA himself. Turns out he has no plans for the balcony over the entry lobby. In a flash, she’s inspired to place her “collection” of “no value” in it, a “broken hearts gallery,” with every item curated and linked to an ex-lover.
And others, they quickly discover, have such mementos too — and sad or bitter or bittersweet stories to go with them. She’ll be “the CFO, chief feelings officer” of the Hotel Chloe.
The hotel isn’t finished and hasn’t even opened, and already it has buzz, Lucy has purpose and Nick just sort of rolls in her wake.
Krinsky writes glorious banter, a must in any rom-com. It’s a blend of cutesy and coarse, with riffs on mourning by “masturbating and braiding your hair for three weeks” and someone who’s as “tight as a Mormon teenager.”
A lot of the quips comes from the BFFs, bitchy lawyer-to-be-Amanda who sports a silent, earbuds-always-in six year boyfriend, and lesbian Lothario (Lothari-a?) Nadine.
There are so many asides and semi-novel touches — Lucy’s “secret” that we sort of see coming, Nick’s which we don’t — not one but TWO cloying karaoke moments, that Krinsky’s script has a hint of “a season’s worth of a sitcom” ideas about it. A little winnowing was in order, even if this or that random bit “brings joy.”
For instance, Nick has to “save” Lucy from creating a scene with an ex and she barks at him for “manhandling” her on a New York public street. New York being New York, a pushy stranger intervenes, assuming assault has occurred.
“Being a woman is like being in a God—–d ‘Nobody BELIEVES Me’ movie!”
Moments and amusing rants aside, the leads are rather pleasantly bland and don’t set off much in the way of sparks or heat. Kind of “The CW” that way. Nick is pointlessly given a best friend with little funny to contribute. Even the villain, the guy who last-dumped-Lucy (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is just pretty and pretty boring.
The casting is a landmark in representation, although few characters make much more than a passing impression. Bernadette Peters is the gallery-owning idol Lucy looks up to.
“I’m not one of these bitches who doesn’t empower women!”
And the very hook that all of this hangs on, the “gallery” of mementos, is far more interesting in its acquisition (videoed testimonials from the donors) than in curation. Kind of a non-starter as an idea, more of a website than an installation.
Yes, there are too many “random” “good talk” attempts to shove fresh (ish) slang into every crack and crevice. And yes, the “Gallery” is entirely too cluttered, literally and in a make-work-project-for-a-lot-of-bland actors way. Charm is forced to fill in for charisma and players that pop.
But even if it plays like a sitcom pilot that might get picked up after a little recasting, “Broken Hearts Gallery” is never unpleasant and only rarely a drag. In rom-com starved Hollywood, call that a “win” and call it a day.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content throughout and some crude references, strong language and drug references
Cast: Geraldine Viswanathan, Dacre Montgomery, Molly Gordon, Phillipa Soo and Bernadette Peters.
Credits: Written and directed by Natalie Krinsky. A Sony Tristar release.
