A thriller about an aimless, dangerous drifter and the stripper who might be his savior?
Actor turned writer-director Sean Patrick Flanery wrote and directed this tale that turns towards horror, and which stars Billy Budinich and Caylee Cowan in the title roles, with Lin Shaye, Kevin Dillon, Flaherty himself and Jonathan Schaech in support.
“Frank and Penelope” opens June 3.
We are…intrigued.
“Official Competition” is an arid farce about movies as “cinema,” the pretension of festivals and festival-honored films made by “critics’ darlings.”
It’s built on scenes that either hit the bullseye, or miss the mark because of slow pacing and a general dryness that might leave comedy fans a bit parched. But anyone who follows “the festival circuit” and “awards season” films will appreciate the way it skewers its targets with jokes and jabs aimed mainly at fans of serious cinema.
Argentine filmmakers Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat (“4X4,” “My Masterpiece”) take a shot at ripping film festivals, art films, cinematic divas and the like with a small but elite cast and one impressively icy setting — a cavernous, ultra-modernist, echoey and empty mansion. That’s where an eccentric filmmaker preps for production and rehearses her two famous co-stars for a film adaptation of a popular novel financed by a boring, little-known rich man who wants to make “a great film” that will become his legacy.
José Luis Gómez is Humberto, the “millionaire” (he’d better be a billionaire) whose 80th birthday reminded him of his relative anonymity. He’d like to leave something behind with his name on it — perhaps an architecturally-stunning bridge? Well, a film would be cheaper.
He will hire only “the best,” starting with the criticall-adored director of “Haze,” “The Inverted Rain” and “The Void.” The film’s first laugh is our first sight of Lola Cuevas. We have never seen Oscar-winner Penélope Cruz perched beneath a mountain of red curls this vast.
Humberto’s spent “a fortune” to get the rights to the novel that Lola will “very very loosely adapt, as in “mostly ignore” as she cuts, pastes and scrapbooks her script to life.
Actors? She insists only two men could play the brothers/”rivals” in this film — the actor’s actor and legendary acting teacher Iván Torres (veteran Argentine actor Oscar Martínez of “Tu Me Manques” and “Live Twice, Love Once”) and rich, celebrated international star Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas).
Their eccentric director will put them through “exercises,” stare down their bubbling “Quien es mas macho?” rivalry and use it to heighten the drama of her picture. She will bully and manipulate. Because she’s dealing with one pretentious poseur who deigns to “correct” her script, right from the start, and a movie star, who isn’t used to the formidable challenge of an egomaniac co-star, a “visionary” director and everybody else’s “method.”
It’s funny when Lola makes snobby Iván repeat his first line in the script — “Buenos dias” — a dozen or more times, trying to get a version she “believes.” It’s funny how he tries to contain his annoyance at this, and how Félix tries to hide his amusement.
Then of course, it’s his turn. Try to play a man who is drunk, trying to pretend he’s not drunk and yet drunk as a “three” on a “scale of one-to-ten.” That’s some seriously precise direction, querida.
The three of them — with an occasional assistant in the room — play mind games over who shows up first and who keeps whom waiting each day, who is the “best” actor, whose technique is more suited to this project, Mr. Deep “Back Story” or Mr. “Just Study the Words” and “play” the part.
The handsome screen star looks for leverage by coming on to the sexy director and other tricks. The actor/educator — think James Lipton without the glasses — never lets anyone on set or off forget that he’s too good for all this.
Sight gags such as the guys’ first glance at the script — a literal scrapbook of photos, pieces of photos, drawings — a 50 microphone “audition” by Humberto’s granddaughter/actress in which we hear every sloppy slurp of the makeout scene she (Pilar Castro) is subjected to, or the reason Lola has each man bring his “awards” to a rehearsal, and deploys packing tape to restrain her hired actors — pay off.
But despite the occasional outlandish moment, most of what’s on view here is mundane — bitching over fabric swatches with an art director — or at least somewhat predictable, right down to the Cannes press conference (droll, ironic, lightly amusing) that wraps everything up.
As a fan of Cohn and Duprat’s tighter, darker previous collaborations I was keenly aware of the passage of screen time and slack pacing here. “Official Competition” feels like an 80 minute spoof bundled in the gauze of a 115 minute film.
Comedy is a close-up medium, but aside from a few moments with Lola’s voluminous hair and freckles, with Félix’s alarm at the contract-violation of touching or endangering “my livelihood, my face (in Spanish with English subtitles),” Cohn and Duprat frame scene after scene in “Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday” long or medium shots. And suffice it to say, neither of them is Jacques Tati.
That adds to the chilly, remote feeling, that there isn’t enough action, aren’t enough outlandish characters or situations to make this as funny as a “For Your Consideration” or any other film about “film festival films.” In making a movie sending up movies like this, they’ve erred on the side of too-on-the-nose.
There’s all this literal and figurative dead space surrounding a tiny cast that has been and can be funnier than “Official Competition” lets them be.
Rating: R for language and some nudity
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Oscar Martínez, Pilar Castro and José Luis Gómez
Credits: Directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, scripted by Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat and Andrés Duprat. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:55
Mixed reviews and Sam Raimi’s offbeat turn toward horror in the third act haven’t dampened the box office impact of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
The film pulled in $36 million from Thursday, adding up to a $90 million Friday. Will it top out at $180, or reach all the $200 million mark by Sunday night?
The fact that it’s on over 4500 screens, including upsold IMAX and other “premium” seats, didn’t hurt. It will swallow the cinema this weekend.
That is the seventh best Friday of all time, per Exhibitor Relations. It’s already earned over $139 million overseas, as well.
“Sonic the Hedgehog 2” is willing the family friendly sweepstakes, rolling in another $6.6 million this weekend, pushing it over $170 million all in by midnight Sunday.
“The Lost City,” the action comedy that’s been the top “date movie” of the spring, added enough cash Friday to point to a $2 4 million weekend, $94 million total in North America.
Ang Lee would go on to Oscar winning glory, helming “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Broke back Mountain.”
But his debut feature was a touching and sometimes amusing fish-out-of-water story about an old widower trying to fit in with his American son’s family and neighborhood in suburban New York.
Tai Chi and King Fu classes might help.
“Pushing Hands” heralded a new talent telling stories about an underfilled community, America’s Asian and Chinese diaspora. Lee would follow this with “The Wedding Banquet” and “Eat Drink Man Woman,” creating what came to be called his “Father Knows Best” trilogy.
His sensibilities proved his worthiness to take on Jane Austen’s”Sense & Sensibility” down the road.
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Bad news/good news time.
Bad news, Justin Lin finally decided the high price of (Vin) Diesel was reason enough to bail out of the “Fast and Furious” franchise. He quit “Fast X.”
Good news, Louis Leterrier, director of the tighter, meaner and occasionally more realistic car chase “Transporter” movies, has been signed to take over.
Bad news, “The Takedown,” Leterrier’s latest cars and cutesy cop buddy picture, made for Netflix, pretty much sucks.
Good and bad news? “Fast 9: The Fast Saga,” and most of the recent of the Lin-helmed car cartoons kind of sucked, too. So the early take on “Fast X” is kind of a (car) wash. Lin or Leterrier, how good could it be?
“Takedown” reteams Omar Sy , French star of “The Intouchables,” who’s turned up in the “Jurassic World” and “X-Men” franchises, with Laurent Lafitte, whose French films (“Tell No One”) have rarely made it to North America.
They played cute and mismatched cops in “On the Other Side of the Tracks” ten years ago. Now, they’re still mismatched but re-teamed for a big case involving murder, drugs and guns and racist French fascists, because they have those, too.
Ousmane Diakité (Sy) rose to become a star of French policing, a two-fisted tough-guy criminal division chief whom the force wants to use in recruiting films as the “face” of French law enforcement. Their first TV ad is a cartoon using him, which irks him no end as they’re plainly using him to pretend they’re more diverse than they are.
François Monge (Lafitte) is a dashing, to-the-manner-born elitist and womanizer whose family connections could only get him to the level of “captain.” Nobody wants to work with him, and he’s so unscrupulously on-the-make that he beds his assigned department psychotherapist in his opening scene.
Ousmane’s introductory scene has him trying to single-handedly bring down a criminally violent “monster” street fighter in an underground (literally) prize fight.
Finding half a corpse dangling from a high speed train entitles Monge to a share of the case, when it turns out he was A) shot first and B) on some new hyped-up drug that makes its addicts relentless and almost impossible to bring down.
So Monge and his superior, Diakité, set out for the provinces from when this decapitated corpse came, to mingle with the “traditional” local “patriots” who are fans of this white nationalist mayor (Dmitri Storoge) who just might be France’s fascist future.
Monge insists that the lovelorn single-dad Diakité hit on the female local cop (Izïa Higelin) they’re assigned to work with, with awkward consequences.
The banter (in French, or dubbed into English) is of the “That was SMALL of you,” “That was small of YOU” put-downs exchanged over public restroom urinals, “barbeque” jokes about the state of a (full frontal nude) half-corpse and the like.
The comedy comes from the rich and tactless Monge’s inability to question people without creating a scene (“Hey, I can be SENSITIVE.”) and the two-fisted Diakité having to try and punch his way out of messy situations.
The leads are engaging, but not nearly as much as they and the film they’re in assume they are.
There’s one big and showy cross country car chase and a bunch of brawls, generally involving the mouthy, prove-how-tough-I-am Diakité. The best effect in this is reconstructing — in 3-D slo-mo — how a motorcyclist came to be shot and sheared in half by a high speed train.
Those minor highlights will have to do because as timely as the plot and the predestined villain seem to be, as an action comedy the plot is preordained and the characters the simplest of archetypes. Everybody does pretty much what you expect them to do when you expect them to do it.
So yes, Leterrier may turn out to be the perfect “Fast X” filmmaker after all.
Rating: TV-MA, gruesome violence, played for laughs, profanity
Cast: Omar Sy, Laurent Lafitte, Dmitri Storoge and Izïa Higelin
Credits: Directed by Louis Leterrier, scripted by Stéphane Kazandjian. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:00
Antonia Campbell-Hughes has the title role, with Joel Fry, Aline Armstrong and Johnny Flynn, who might be the threat, in this paranoid thriller. “Cordelia” comes our way May 20, via Screen Media.
This engrossing drama about bullying and its impact not just on the boy directly subject to it, but to his sister, stay at home dad, family and a school bureaucracy helpless to handle it has a lot to offer…and subtitles. It’s in French. Let’s hope tiny Halifax, Va. is up for it.
“Playground” is a challenging, rewarding and sometimes heartbreaking film, well worth checking out.
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If there’s one thing the pandemic lockdown taught us, it’s that some filmmakers had ideas that turn the restrictions and limitations of that time into dramatic scenarios.
“Glimpse” combines disparate, isolated characters, hidden camera CCTV footage and rising paranoia about just what “they” know about us and can do to invade our privacy for a short, not remotely satisfying thriller. It’s pretty good as a proof-of-concept, evidence of just what sort of compelling story you can tell with self-isolated actors, limited locations and a clever conceit to hang it all on. But that’s all it is.
Three people (Ashley Nicole Black, Erin Darke and Raúl Esparza) work from home, staring at their computers as they watch — via CCTV — the lives unfolding in what appear to be three ordinary if somewhat upscale homes.
One couple, a real estate agent (Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson) are sweating out his latest job interview in their suburban designer McMansion. A professional woman (Krysta Rodriguez) is trying to control her temper at her live-in lover’s (Van Hughes) guitar-picking indolence. And a mother (Alysia Reiner) patiently helps her kid with Spanish homework until her husband (David Alan Bashe) comes home and they can make out like horny teenagers — again.
Their “spies” are eating delivered food, playing with toys, rolling their eyes at their boring jobs monitoring these folk, whom they find themselves shouting at their screens about as their subjects accept flawed relationships and bore the hell out of those “watching” them.
The “spies” also swap phone calls.
“I thought you said this was legal.”
“I’m not arguing ETHICS with somebody who’s doing the same UNETHICAL thing I’m doing!”
They have only the vaguest notion of what they’re doing, and they have little idea who this rich, leisure-loving tyrant (Janet McTeer) is whom they’re working for.
And then, a masked “intruder” slips into one of those houses, just out of sight of the couple one spy is supposed to be monitoring. That sets off a whole chain of increasingly frantic calls as the underlings try to come up with an “ethical” answer to this dilemma.
You’re spying on people who might be in danger. Do you warn them? And if so, how?
That promising thriller or comic thriller premise is pretty much frittered away by TV veteran (“Smash,” “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue”) Theresa Rebeck, serving as writer-director here.
She has a few interesting characters, a competent cast, decent (Georgia?) locations and a hot-button “issue” subject with serious dramatic or comic dramatic possibilities. But the film just lies there.
Suspense is frittered away, jokes aren’t landed, the spied-upon underreact in mostly bizarre, uninteresting and unnatural ways to the threats that become increasingly obvious to them.
And the resolution, the over-explained but inadequate “explanation” for all this wrongdoing and manipulation is never more than underwhelming.
McTeer has a nice “You can’t quit, I OWN you menace,” but there’s little pathos to the victims or ethical dilemma guilt to the perpetrators.
Rebeck has her proof-of-concept. She just doesn’t do enough with it.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Janet McTeer, Carrie Preston, Alysia Reiner, Ashley Nicole Black, Raúl Esparza, Michael Emerson, David Alan Bashe, Krysta Rodriguez, Van Hughes and John Preston
Credits: Scripted and directed by Theresa Rebeck. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:14
The great thing about Bogart was that he never lost that nasty edge that gave him a career, even as he transitioned from heavies to leading men. There’s a hint of Fred C. Dobbs, Duke Mantee and Roy Earle in many a character in his post-“Maltese Falcon”/”Casablanca” years, especially the film noirs.
Nicholas Ray made great use of the “real” Humphrey Bogart — polished, an upper middle class prep-schooled New York sophisticate — and let him tap into his mercurial menace for “In a Lonely Place,” an early Ray triumph and a classic noir that stands among Bogart’s best.
Considering the guy played Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, that’s saying something.
“In a Lonely Place” casts Bogie as a cynical, cruel screenwriter in need of a hit and utterly unconcerned about a young hat-check girl who is murdered after his careless treatment of her in prepping a script.
Dixon Steele hasn’t had a hit “since the war.” He’s never lost his favorite table at the post dinner club Paul’s, but his professional desperation has done nothing for his hair trigger temper.
His long-suffering agent (Art Smith) has a can’t-miss assignment lined up, adapting a pot-boiler novel. Even that can’t keep Dix from punching a studio chief’s son who gets on his nerves, and in public no less.
He’d best call it a night, read this book and start giving the director ideas about what he’ll do with it in the morning. Only Dix has hit the lazy, dismissive stage of his writing career. He can’t be bothered to read this romance. The hat-check girl at Paul’s read it. He’ll tempt, cajole and pay her to come by and tell him the story of it.
Just a couple of years into his directing career, Ray had already established a knack for pitiless thrillers with a hint of sentiment about them, and a determination to give female characters agency and actresses showcases for that agency.
Martha Stewart –– no, not THAT Martha Stewart — had only a dozen or so screen credits. But as the pretty, unschooled and enthusiastic reader Mildred, she pops right off the screen
“Oh I think it’ll make a dreamy picture, Mr. Steele. What I call an epic.”
“And what do you call an epic?”
“Well, you know – a picture that’s REAL long and has lots of things going on!”
Their scenes — with wide-eyed Mildred gushing through the novel’s romance and suicides — and Steele airily correcting her mispronunciation of the title character’s name, “risqué” and other words — crackle, and set us up to appreciate every woman who appears on the screen.
From the starlets who flirt with Steele — “Do you look down on ALL women, or just the ones you know?” — to the African American singing pianist (Hadda Brooks) and the grumpy cleaning woman with her ever-dangling cigarette — Ray frames them and lights them all like stars, and lets them shine.
That sets us up for the mysterious neighbor, witness to some of the night’s events and destined to become Steele’s lady love and new obsession. The legendary Gloria Grahame wasn’t yet a legend in 1950, although she was fated to be on every American TV every Christmas, having made a vivid impression in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But the smart, flinty blonde of “The Big Heat,” “Macao,” “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “Odds Against Tomorrow” gives us a preview of her future glory here.
Failed actress Laurel Grey exchanged probing glances with her dashing neighbor, noticed “the girl” he brought home and even when he callously sent Mildred into the night without calling her a cab, dangerous in LA even in 1950. If she heard Mildred’s over-enthusiastic “acting” of the novel (she screams “Help, HELP HELP” at one point.), she never tells the cops.
Laurel falls for “the suspect.”
Mildred left that apartment and wound up dead in a ditch. And when an old Army subordinate (Frank Lovejoy), now a police detective fetches Dix for an interrogation by his chief (Carl Benton Reid), they’re both put off — if not downright shocked — by the jaded screenwriter’s joking reaction to the helpful, innocent young woman’s death.
“Why didn’t you call for a cab? Isn’t that what a gentleman usually does under the circumstances?”
“Oh I didn’t say I was a gentleman. I said I was tired.“
He’s not even that put out at being a suspect.
“I’ve killed dozens of people…in pictures.”
“In a Lonely Place” briskly takes us into the romance that begins despite all the evidence of Steele’s cavalier cruelty and bad temper, and a police investigation driven by the cops’ reaction to Steele’s almost inhuman disdain for a death his uncaring actions caused.
Bogart makes this guy dangerous beyond the flashes of violent temper that he displays even to the “popcorn salesman” director who wants to give him a big break. Grahame, in what can best be described as “The Lauren Bacall role,” deftly journeys from smitten to devoted to recognizing the trap that this monster might be, even as Laurel refuses to let the cops know she’s starting to have her doubts.
That cop who looks like a very young Peter Graves? That’s James Arness, the future Matt Dillon of “Gunsmoke.” The flower shop employee who makes a movie star impression hosing down the sidewalk is African American character actor Davis Roberts in an early role. Hadda Brooks is so good in a single scene that you lament that the racist era she came up in limited her acting/singing career to just a handful of credits.
The dialogue by Andrew Solt and Edmund North (Dorothy Hughes gets a story credit) sizzles and stings, and even lapses into florid. With our anti-hero being a screenwriter, you’d expect nothing less.
“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”
Ray and Bogart skillfully navigate this noir as it veers from murder investigation to romance to study in high functioning bipolar “creative type,” a man whose charm is tinged with violence.
And none of it would work if Bogart didn’t make us believe, first scene to last, that Dixon Steele is narcissistic bad news, a jerk who causes incidents and accidents and is somehow always the victim, a woman-beating hothead worth fleeing, with or without a murder rap hanging over him.
Rating: unrated, violence, smoking
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Art Smith, Frank Lovejoy, Martha Stewart, Jeff Donnell, Carl Benton Reid and Robert Warwick
Credits: Directed by Nicolas Ray, scripted by Andrew Solt, Dorothy Hughes and Edmund H. North. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers.
Running time: 1:34
Making Wendy a bigger deal in this story has been a thing for a decade or more. “The Lost Girls” promises to be the most Wendy centric version yet. June 17.
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