Movie Nation

There’s a lot of good stuff to chew on in this Hollywood Reporter take on Netflix hitting the wall, this time from a content quality and quantity point of view.

They greenlit an insane number of series and movies, threw a lot of money at people who either knew how to indulge themselves in spending it, or have no business spending it in the first place.

Spielberg and I have been saying that for years.

Kim Masters’ piece on their reckoning is here, schadenfreude and all. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/netflixs-big-wake-up-call-the-power-clash-behind-the-crash-1235136004/

Seems like a week doesn’t go by when somebody isn’t serving up a fresh batch of New Orleans music and New Orleans musicians in documentary form.

So for everybody who missed the earlier takes, and who can’t wait for the history of “Jazz Fest” doc that’s coming in a week or so, here’s “Take Me to the River: New Orleans.” Record producer and sometime filmmaker Martin Shore delivers a sequel to 2014’s “Take Me to the River” about the soul sound of Stax Records in Memphis, this time digging into the roots of funk and the ongoing evolution of jazz.

He spent years rounding up the vast extended Neville family members and Doctor John, Irma Thomas and legends from this or that brass band — Preservation Hall to Soul Rebels. He’d park them in the studio for live-on-tape sessions with Ledisi (a duet with New Orleans soul-pop legend Irma Thomas), Ledisi, Ani DiFranco, Snoop Dogg and others, contemporizing their sound and giving stars or rising stars the chance to work with their heroes.

Drummer Shannon Powell displays his mastery of the sticks and toothless grin as he shows off at this “I beat to eat” skills at his kit. Jon Batiste talks about the musical ferment one grows up in there, the mentors, teachers and long line of musicians who somebody coming up can learn from. Batiste learned how to lead a band, just by watching the legions of them performing at any given time in and around the city.

The music bumps and twists, roars and toots — Dixieland to funk, blues to soul, all of it tracing its roots back to Congo Square’s drum shows during the 18th and 19th century, when the city’s slaves would gather to play.

Anecdotes pour out and John Goodman narrates and reminds us of all the famous names in New Orleans music captured in this film who passed away before Shore got it finished.

As a film, its mix of interviews, little snippets of street life and Goodman’s drawled history lessons take a back seat to the loose and breezy recording sessions all around town. There’s no re-inventing the wheel, here. As New Orleans already went to the trouble of inventing the music and building a culture around it, all Shore had to do was point his camera towards the sound of the drums and he was good to go. He also convinced all these icons of the scene to sit down and gather round one more time for the microphones, recording gear and cameras, which is the real point here.

No, it’s not a cinematic wonder. But it’s educational, all this stuff about “second lines” and the “Habanera tempo” who learned from whom and who wrote or invented what. And Shore is to be celebrated for getting all these folks documented and down on film before it’s too late.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Aaron Neville, Irma Thomas, Ledisi, G-Eazy, Snoop Dogg, Charles Neville, Allen Toussaint, Jon Batiste and Doctor John, with many others, narrated by John Goodman

Credits: Directed by Martin Shore, scripted by Robert Gordon and Martin Shore. A 360 Distribution release.

Running time: 1:50

Jerrod Carmichael — who also directed — and Christopher Abbott have had enough and a suicide pact is their plan B.

Can Tiffany Haddish, Henry Winkler or JB Smoove talk them out of it? Do any of them even want to?

May 13, in theaters and streaming from Annapurna.

Think of the thriller “Silverton Siege” as a South African “Dog Day Afternoon” — a hostage situation, a bank surrounded and a tense stand-off with potent political implications.

Director Mandla Dube and a superb cast deliver a tight and tense true story that hews to genre formula because that’s what hostage thrillers all do. There are just a couple of ways this all ends, after all.

But stars Thabo Ramatesi, Noxolo Dlamini and Stefan Erasmus animate a wildly-improvised 1980 day of political terrorism, designed to “make this country ungovernable,” tumbling into Plan C after Plan A is aborted and Plan B — their escape — is foiled. And with his first produced screenplay, Sabelo Mgidi makes a wry, raw comment on the delusions of “racial purity” at a moment when Apartheid finally started to crack.

Four “freedom fighters” were set to blow up the tanks at a huge fuel storage facility. But cagey, experienced Calvin Khumalo (Rametesi) smells a trap just before it springs. They escape in their van, only to be chased all over Pretoria, losing one of their number in the process.

Captain Langerman (veteran South African heavy Arnold Vosloo) has them cornered, at last. That’s when they storm into a bank, take its diverse population of racially segregated customers hostage, and try to bargain their way out.

Things get really interesting when their negotiated escape goes wrong, and Khumalo decides that whatever transpires, this just became bigger than these three and their hostages.

“What’s the price of freedom? EVERYTHING.”

The “true story” angle immunizes the picture — somewhat — from any tendency to mutter “Oh come on!” Some of the sermonizing you have to figure was invented, the “non violence” ethos declared by the freedom fighters sanitizes them and as character names were changed, other elements aren’t the literal truth.

There’s an African American boxing promoter (Shane Wellington) in line, irked at overt racism by some Boer on the staff — “I ‘m from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I deal with dumbass rednecks all the time!” — and even more irked when the freedom fighters threaten his safety, his livelihood and his bedazzled briefcase full of cash.

“We have an American citizen in here,” slows the roll of the police, with an officious martinet who has his own SWAT team showing up.

A priest, a South Asian man, a woman of mixed-race “passing” and a bank supervisor (Elani Dekker) with her own complicated racial history are among the other hostages. And some bull-necked bigot bank security chief figures he gets to decide who is “white?”

That adds weight to a movie that does well enough with the standard hostage drama situations — bickering amongst the hostage takers, “Stockholm Syndrome” with a hint of racial tolerance to it among the hostages, escalating stakes as demands are met or delayed.

Ramatesi, Dlamini as the female firebrand Terra and “pregnant wife” gunman Aldo (Erasmus) are terrific leads, giving us layered characters with competing agendas in a generally brisk and taut tale.

“Silverton” may be more on-the-nose with its messaging than in its literal history. But making his second feature film, Dube gets a heroic yarn out of a fairly conventional genre piece and sets a couple of fresh faces up for stardom in the process. After all, “Dog Day Afternoon” was fictionalized, too.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Thabo Ramatesi, Noxolo Dlamini, Arnold Vossloo, Stefan Erasmus, Elani Dekker and Shane Wellington

Credits: Directed by Mandla Dube, scripted by Sabelo Mgidi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

A real-time (ish?) thriller from a GoPro POV, this tale of terror takes us on a night Annie Hardy, the young lady whose streaming gimmick is “bandcar,” will never forget.

This Blumhouse release, from the Brit who gave us that 57 minute creep out “Zoom call seance” thriller “Host,” comes our way June 3.

Our big screen tough guys are fading into the shadows, right before our eyes. A generation of them are either hanging it up or descending into C-movies to pad their estates as their years of kicking ass and tearing off tough one-liners pass.

Liam Neeson leans into his 70th year with a thriller tailor-made for a hard man “they” won’t let retire. In “Memory,” he wears the years and the miles on his weathered face and no-longer-hulking frame. He plays a hitman who understands that it’s not the aim, the eyesight and the physique that decline the fastest, it’s the mind.

In this adaptation of a 2003 Belgian thriller, Neeson is Alex, a tall older gent who travels the bloody borderlands between Texas and Mexico, driving inconspicuous beaters, dropping burner phones, passing himself off as a nurse, when the occasion arises.

That’s how he gets access to a “contract,” a made man visiting his mama in the hospital. Unsentimental Alex garrotes the guy, right in front of ventilatored Mom. Not his tidiest job.

“I’m getting out” he tells Mauricio (Lee Boardman), his longtime go-between. “Men like us don’t retire,” Mauricio reminds him.

There’s another job — a two-target hit — in Alex’s old home town of El Paso. He’ll do it, reluctantly. And he’ll check in on his catatonic brother in the nursing home while he’s there.

Guy Pearce plays a similarly grizzled Federal agent who just saved a young teen (Mia Sanchez) from her sex trafficker father, but who resists his efforts to put her in a decent foster care living situation. She’s a kid who “knows things.” Unbeknownst to Alex, this tarted-up photo that he is told is his second target is her.

“She’s a child! I won’t do it!” doesn’t get a sympathetic hearing. So Alex takes on a new mission. He’ll evade the Feds and local law enforcement (Ray Stevenson) and take out all the mobsters in this Mexico-to-Texas human sex trafficking/drug trafficking cartel, one by one.

Director Martin Campbell, of “Goldeneye,””Casino Royale” and “The Mask of Zorro,” more lately behind the camera for a Jackie Chan’s last hurrah “The Foreigner” and Maggie Q and Michael Keaton’s “The Protege,” ably sets up our quest, the moving parts in it and the story’s hook.

Alex is on medication. He’s losing his memory. He has to write details on his arm, in magic marker, just like Guy Pearce’s character did in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.”

Is he still nimble enough and tough enough, can he remember enough to pull off this house cleaning?

“We all have to die, Vincent,” he tells his FBI pursuer at one point. “What’s important is what you do before you go.”

Neeson’s distinct, growled gift to one-liners is given a nice workout in Dario Scardapone’s script.

“It wasn’t supposed to go this far!” a target pleads.

“If I’m here, it’s gone too far!”

Of course there are stunts and physical feats that would be hard to believe a guy 20 years younger could pull them off. And there’s a moment, when Pearce and Neeson share a tense scene that goes over-the-top memory-loss loopy that we can see “Man, can you hear the ridiculous lines they gave you?” in Pearce’s eyes, staring down Neeson.

That’s a sign a decent if formulaic thriller has taken a dive.

The film tries to walk a narrow political line — suggesting rampant Mexican criminality and Texas corruption and a Mexican agent’s (Harold Torres) outrage that “the appetite for big fish ends at the border.”

And there are a couple of grabber moments that punch up a seriously played-out vengeance thriller plot. Let’s just say your days of taking the exercycle right next to the window of that strip mall “gym” you frequent will end after “Memory.”

But the premise, that a not-remotely-young man suffering from the early stages of dementia could still overpower and outshoot one and all, perform self-surgery on a gunshot wound, sneak onto a yacht party and hit well-guarded targets, seems a stretch. As is the Hollywood way, his illness picks the damnedest places to announce its presence. It comes and goes according to what the script dictates.

It’s still a half-decent movie, closer to Neeson’s late-career “Taken” peak than his most recent films. But if he’s letting the audience see the writing on the wall, it might be time for him to stop and read it, too.

Rating: R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout.

Cast: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Louis Mandylor and Ray Stevenson

Credits: Directed by Martin Campbell, scripted by Dario Scardapane, based on the Belgian film  “De zaak Alzheimer,” “The Memory of a Killer,” adapted from the novel by Jef Geeraerts. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:54

Let’s face it. PBS is never going to produce an “American Masters” documentary on The Grateful Dead. But personal essays like “Box of Rain,” movies about the fan experience, the phenomenon of the “family” — their tribal, migrant fanbase — point to a serious blindspot on the Brit soap opera-obsessed Public Broadcasting Service.

If Deadheads aren’t an “American Experience” waiting to be remembered, I don’t know what is.

Lonnie Frazier’s “Box of Rain” isn’t definitive. It doesn’t have Grateful Dead music or concert footage in it. There’s a Dead-ish twangy score that could have been made by “the family” in “the parking lot scene,” the musical street fair/festival/market fans nicknamed “Shakedown Street.” She and her interview subjects skate past the druggy nature of the culture, underplaying it to a disingenuous degree. And they downplay the tragedies at Dead shows. More than a few concerts were marred by fan deaths.

But this warm, embracing little film — catching up with old friends from “the road,” remembering epic road trips following the band, chatting with other, even-more-devoted fans and even the director of another Deadhead documentary — vividly creates a sense of the community that the band inspired, with its own economy, values and shared creed.

“I Need a Miracle,” aka “Who’s got tickets to the next show?”

Frazier personalizes the Dead by saying her first show, an ’80s cross-country trek as a teen in her Chevette, “saved my life.” A victim of gang-rape, she’d figured out the small town in Maryland where she grew up was “not my home.” At a Dead concert at Red Rocks in Colorado, she found a new one.

Frazier and her friends found themselves in the ongoing cosplay counterculture of the 1980s, a world that was “the opposite” of that “Valley Girl, big hair Reaganomics” era. Here was Woodstock — tie-dyed, turned-on and dropped-out and touring — sometimes taking over for several shows cities and towns all across America in the middle of the “Greed is Good” decade.

“The worst day on tour still beats the best day at work,” one fellow traveler enthuses. They’d pile into colorfully-decorated VW Microbuses, camp out and live hand to mouth for days, weeks or months on end, traveling from venue to venue because this “electric Dixieland” “jam band” never put on the same show twice, never played a song the same way twice. Before the concert began, and after it ended, the parking lot “Shakedown Street” (a Dead tune) kept the musical/fraternal good times going.

Here’s wheelchair-bound James LeBrecht, seen in the documentary “Crip Camp,” marveling at the acceptance, the pre-Americans with Disabilities Act wheelchair-access (handmade ramps and platforms built by fans and the crew).

Filmmaker Brian O’Donnell, who filmed his own years-in-the-making Dead-and-their-fans-on-tour documentary, is leaned on to categorize the fanbase. There were “The spinners,” dancers in the audience who twirled through shows “like whirling dervishes,” first song to last, “the tapers” who’d use band-provided audio feeds to cassette-record every show, “the listers,” fans who kept meticulous set lists of every concert, and so on.

Older fans demonstrate the dervish spinning thing with tie-dyed capes. Others recall that one “magic” moment or concert that distilled the experience for them.

“The music of life,” one aficionado calls their jams, because “life is improvisational.”

Not having access to the Dead’s music seriously undercuts the motivation for this devotion. But there’s a four hour Netflix “Long Strange Trip” doc, and others, to cover that.

There’s a chuckling admission that sometimes shows were musical “trainwrecks” due to the nature of the improvisations that they built their shows on, or in my case — a terrible sound mix at the Minneapolis Metrodome.

And there’s recognition that after the band’s “Touch of Grey” Top 40 hit, a rougher, dumber and more drunken element started filling the shows, suggesting that the best days had passed.

“We got to see America” following the tours, one fan says, “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

But there’s no denying the cultural phenomenon that developed around the Dead, one of almost cultlike devotion, with priorities out of step with the rest of society.

I got my first job in media because the other top candidate — my fellow summer intern at a public TV station — told our supervisors he’d “pass” on the gig because “I’m hitting the road with the Dead.”

Our long-haired bosses looked genuinely disappointed — at not being free enough to go along with him, at having to give the job to somebody who wasn’t willing to take similar risks for what “Box of Rain” reveals was a youthful adventure-of-a-lifetime experience.

Movies like “Box of Rain” and the Rick Springfield fan doc “An Affair of the Heart” may not give us the complete experience, sharing the music that so enchants fans that they devote huge chunks of their lives to the performer and the concert experience provided.

But the Deadheads were the generation-defining inventors of this long-term phenomenon. Without Deadheads, there are no Parrotheads, or Phish Heads. Without Deadhead stickers, a VW van is just an antique.

In or out of the tribe, Deadheads were every bit as emblematic of the American Experience of the ’80s as pastel suits and trickle down economics. “Box of Rain” might be too narrow in focus to pass broadcast muster, but PBS should consider this a gauntlet-thrown, and this time the glove is florescent and tie-dyed.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Elizabeth Abel-Talbott, Kelley L. Condon, Brian O’Donnell, James LeBrecht, Joey Talley, Tim Zecha and Lonnie Frazier

Credits: Directed and narrated by Lonnie Frazier. A Mutiny release.

Running time: 1:18

Guy Pearce as a Fed. Thursday night as your opening.

Love that Liam.

Who’d ever guess that buried beneath the Bollywood musical romance “Hey! Sinamika” there was an Argentine rom-com one third shorter, screaming “Aye, no puedo respirar!”

This “Around the World with Netflix” marathon is an Indian romance about a woman who longs to be free of over smothering, jabbering, clingy but cute husband, which flips the gender of the spouse-who-wants-out from the 2008 Spanish language comedy “Un novio para mi mujer,” “A Boyfriend for my Wife.”

It’s in Tamil (mostly) and is set in the cities of Chennai and Pondicherry. And it’s comedy that begins with a “meet cute,” turns quickly to “This maddening man, how can escape him?” and lapses into “This maddening movie, will they ever get to the bloody point?”

Because there have to be production numbers, dance/song solos and a love duet or two. They have to dazzle and they most certainly do — a stunningly shot wedding dance in tribute to a bride, a rough-and-ready long-take street rap-song about a guy finding his voice.

Sure, the lyrics are…puerile, “a she plucked from my roots and poured water on my shoots” loses something in translation. Perhaps.

And the love story, while involving lots of sweeping our leading lady (Aditi Rao Hydari) off her feet — literally, has no kissing, no skin and zero heat — even with a hired seductress making this a love triangle — because chastity is Old School Bollywood.

But if you’ve never set aside an afternoon or evening — or both — to sit through a classic Bollywood romance, here’s a less-than-awful updating of the formula that sucks up just about as much time.

Dulquer Salmaan plays Yaazhan, who tries to impress the pretty lady (Hydari) who shows up at the same seaside cafe one morning. Their “meet cute” begins with the dashing Yaazhan stumbling as he tries to get the waiter to tell him where the coffee beans came from — “Only the best places, sahib!” — and climaxes with a sudden wind squall which she then saves him from.

“Trust me,” she says, and he does. It turns out, she’s a “paleotempestologist.” She studies weather, its history and impacts on structures and people. He’s a software engineer who “just lost my fourth job,” and a bit of a gourmand. As they begin a flirtation, with musical accompaniment, she drops this bomb.

“If I married someone like you, I’d spend half my life at the gym!”

BAM. They’re married. Indian movies may go on eternally, but when it comes to marriages, there’s no messing around.

Two years pass and Yaazhan’s breathless, nonstop patter has driven Mouna to distraction. He is literally shoving food in her mouth, even in the shower. He picks out her clothes for her. He is the hovering, over-attentive house husband from hell.

Colleagues coach her on how to provoke a divorce, to no avail.

Mouna begs her boss for an out of town assignment — working with designers on a building project in Pondicherry. Yaazhan surprises her by showing up and joining her there.

We get her, and we get it. We hate this guy, too.

This movie might never be a target for a Hollywood remake because there are WAY too many psychological terms bandied about for Yaazhan’s “controlling” behavior. But he’s smitten and he seems to mean well.

And then there’s the highly unscrupulous couples counselor Dr. Malaravizi (Kajal Aggarwal) who lives and practices next door. Mouna consults with her, over the objections of the Dr.’s receptionist, who pleads that “Happy couples come in, unhappy ones depart.”

That’s actually the funniest thing in the movie and a gag worth repeating, a bit player worth building up and having some fun with. But no.

Mouna gets the doctor to “take an interest” in her man with the goal of seducing and tripping him up and busting up this suffocating marriage.

But when we meet two of Mouna’s Pondicherry pals who do radio, we jump thirty minutes ahead of this slow-slower-slowest narrative and figure, “That’s where Yaazhan’s manic, breathless patter belongs — Isai 103.5 FM, Joy knows no end here.”

It may seem I’m giving away a lot of plot, but there’s a LOT more where that came from, confrontations with a phony yogi, role reversals and backlash and counter-backlash over who doesn’t love whom. When your movie covers 150 minutes of screen time, there’s plenty of room for exposition, even if you limit the number of characters.

Does this central love triangle have enough to it to carry a movie that long? No, it does not.

The production numbers — I counted five or so, with musical montages too –aren’t filler, padding out the run time. They’re the main reason to see “Hey! Sinamika.” It’s all the soapy, maudlin, repetitive melodrama and never-quite-funny annoyance scenes that make the film an ordeal.

The leads are beautiful specimens of humanity and set off sparks in their meet cute moment. But never again. The genre almost ordains limits on “chemistry.”

There’s a lighter, funnier, sexier movie in this material. But it was probably the one already made in Argentina, without the cool dance numbers.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Aditi Rao Hydari, Kajal Aggarwal

Credits: Directed by Brinda Master, scripted by Madhan Karky, based on the Argentine film “Un novio para mi mujer” by Juan Tararatuto and Pablo Solarzby A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:27

This is pretty cool. Scorsese’s 32 year old film preservation nonprofit is going to be sharing restored films via it’s website, starting May 9.

The first film will be an early work by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, “I Know Where I am Going,” from 1945.

Marty S is a huge Powell fan.

Details are at the link below.

https://www.film-foundation.org/rsr-press-release