Another prequel? Steve Carell doing the Young Gru voice?
Look at this supporting cast — Michelle Yeoh, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Taraji P.. Henson, Lucy Lawless, Dolph Lundgren, Danny Trejo, RZA, Alan Arkin and…Julie Andrews.
For a horror movie, “Night’s End” comes up awfully short in frights. Even the manufactured quick-cut “jolts” couldn’t alarm a toddler, even if the SHRIEK accompanying them would wake anybody.
For a film bathed in gloom, there’s little suspense or building dread about how things are and how bad they’re about to be.
As a pandemic lock-down filmmaking “exercise,” it’s only moderately effective, making use ofshut-in vlogger’s living quarters, giving us a peek at his life and the lives of others, meeting him online, chatting from their carefully Zoom curated “backdrops.”
But maybe that’s looking at Jennifer Reeder’s picture all wrong. Just over an hour into this short and slow slog, there’s “evidence” of a ghost (yawn) that gives everybody listed on the credits a chance to show us their scared-witless face — framed on a computer screen. And damned if it isn’t hilarious.
The fact that one of those faces belongs to the great Michael Shannon, sharing scenes with his real-life wife Kate Arrington, just adds to the amusement. You want to see how hard it is to pull off that look and justifiable reaction in a 15.6 inch diagonal-measure laptop screen? Watch these pros of varying talents take their best shot.
Geno Walker plays Ken Barber, a new-to-Agoraphobia guy who lost his job, his family and maybe his mind some months ago. He lives in a dark apartment in a mostly-empty older building, with rooms separated by plastic sheet doorways and the windows meticulously covered with custom-cut clips of newspapers.
He strips the labels off every food can, every one of the many Pepto bottles he keeps to mix with his morning coffee. Ken exercises, counts backward at bedtime and judges each challenge he faces as “forward progress.”
Ken does vlogs, running multiple channels in hopes of making this his unemployed supplemental income gig — “Ken Barber’s Management Tips,””Ken Barber’s Divorced Dad Tips,” “Ken Barber’s Long Life Tips.”
But he doesn’t notice when one of the stuffed birds he decorates his refuge with tumbles off a shelf behind him while making a video. Shockingly, he has an audience, and some of them notice. So does his BFF Terry (Felonious Munk).
“Maybe it’s a ghost.”
His re-married ex-wife (Arrington), on good terms despite Ken’s “breakdown,” suggests he “do some research” on the place. “Did somebody die there?”
And the next thing you know, Ken is doing that digging, reading this online weirdo’s (the ironically-named Lawrence Grimm) “ghost” book, taking suggestions and gaining attention as his videos become a cult hit.
It’s just that whatever’s there is drawing blood, hurling him off his chair, knocking on his door and reaching through the crack as he opens it. And every single incident is accompanied by a blood-curdling scream.
No, not Ken’s.
Director Reeder (“Knives and Skin”) has a movie framed in mostly close-ups — a must for maximum frights — cloaked in shadows and built around ghosts and “evidence” of their presence. But she and her editor cannot manufacture suspense in post-production and blow every single “gotcha” with cuts that don’t reveal enough to be frightening and that never build towards anything.
The cast is adequate, although Walker isn’t the most compelling lead, even taking into account the myopic conditions this was filmed under. Only Grimm seems to get the camp this could be, a supernatural “expert” who looks like Steve Buscemi and tries on his best Alan Rickman vamp while parked in front of shelves covered in lit candles for his Zoom shot.
Whatever “Night’s End” didn’t do for me, that one big unintentional cast-wide-gasp laugh at about an hour in was the best I’ve had in months, so thanks for that.
Rating: unrated, violet imagery, profanity
Cast: Geno Walker, Felonious Munk, Kate Arrington, Lawrence Grimm, Daniel Kyri and Michael Shannon.
Credits: Directed by Jennifer Reeder, scripted by Brett Neveu. A Shudder release.
“Well,” you say to yourself, “one reason we travel ‘Around the World with Netflix’ is to sample other cultures, see the world from a different culture’s point of view.”
So you write off piffle like “All Hail (Granizo)” as an aberration. Because surely Argentina doesn’t obsess over weather forecasts like this. Surely Argentina has its own Weather Channel. And surely Argentines wouldn’t think a 1970s style variety show built around a Big Weather Forecast on a set that could have come from the 1970s Hollywood TV satire “Network” is “destination television.”
A national cinema that’s produced a string of top drawer murder mysteries and thrillers in recent years is entitled to stumble in trying to produce a dramedy about the weather, a “hero” weather man, an enraged stalker fan and family. Director Marcos Carnevale (“No soy tu mami”) and two screenwriters — one of whom won an Oscar for co-writing Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Birdman” — don’t manage anything new, fresh or the least big interesting with those assorted elements in their two hour movie.
When we meet him, Miguel Flores (Guillermo Francella) is living the life in Buenos Aires — 50something, housed in a swank apartment, a car service that picks him up each day, a steady date with a fetching “friend with benefits” after work. He’s stopped on the street for selfies, plastered all over the sides of buses. He is “Miguel the Infallible,” a TV weather forecaster with a self-described “twenty years without a mistake” forecasting record.
He’s so popular that his station has bought his pitch for a nightly show about the weather, complete with a salsa band, so he can dance his way onstage each night. Sure, they saddle him with “an assistant,” the leggy, giggly blonde Mery (Laura Fernández), who is young and a social media darling. But no worries, right? Just a hook for a younger audience.
All that comes to pieces with Miguel’s first fallible forecast. It’s a hailstorm that wrecks cars not in garages, smashes windows not covered and kills dogs left outside, and Miguel, who “guaranteed” mild conditions (in dubbed English, or in Spanish with subtitles) slept through it. The entire city is enraged.
In an instant, he is “sent on a break,” Mery takes over the show and Miguel is a hounded, hunted man in the media. Now would be a good time to dash off to Córdoba, visit his pediatrician daughter Carla (Romina Fernandes) whose messages he’s been dodging forever.
There are hints of “Network,” “The Weather Man” and even a little “LA Story” magical realism in the building blocks of this movie. But everything planted in this story is allowed to wither on the vine.
Carla’s unusual lifestyle — she might be a swinger — is hinted at and abandoned. The father-daughter-weather issues date back to the film’s opening image, the mystery of how he was widowed and Carla grew up without a mom. Tossed out there and left hanging. Even the furious cabbie who vows revenge is a non-starter.
The story’s shallow lack of ambition can be explained in one last idea brought into play, an old coot of the mountains who seems to know exactly when it will rain or shower “hailstones as big as soccer balls.” So Miguel’s “redemption” has nothing to do with being a better person, less self-absorbed, a better father, someone who finally deals with his wife’s death.
Director Carnevale and screenwriters Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone (“Birdman”) completely and utterly lose the thread in the “message” and “moral of the story” department. And most annoying of all, their puzzlingly, infuriatingly vapid movie takes two hours doing it.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Guillermo Francella, Romina Fernandes and Laura Fernández
Credits: Directed by Marcos Carnevale, scripted by Fernando Balmayor and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.
I’ve interviewed, at various times, all three people directly involved in Sunday night’s debacle. That doesn’t mean I “know” them, but it did give me a take on what happened, and how and what its awful implications are.
But Twitter debate is one thing, and the opinionating on this incident has broken down on gender lines, racial lines and those who listen to Jada’s podcast and those who had no idea it existed.
I’d rather defer to what I regard as the definitive view on this, one delivered by NBA legend and voice of reason and conscience columnist Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
An intimate piece of romantic folklore with breathtaking geographical ambition, “The Tale of the King Crab” comes to theaters feeling familiar, but startling in what it shows us and where it takes us.
Its first half is an immersive Italian period piece, the story of a love that cannot be in an exquisitely detailed recreation of a 19th century Italian village. The second half is where our damned, lovelorn hero exiles himself to “the a–h–e of the world,” Tierra del Fuego, and finds himself hunting for Spanish treasure with the help of a king crab.
Documentarians Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, who gave us “Il solengo,” the non-fiction account of a hermit in the woods near Rome, make their feature debut another story of a loner of legend, this one a dissolute doctor’s son who moves back home and crawls into a bottle as he becomes smitten with a peasant lass.
Our story is told by storytellers, a group of older modern day Italian hunters eating, drinking and regaling each other with the passed-down account of Luciano (documentary director turned actor Gabrielle Silli). The yarn-spinners acknowledge how such tales are exaggerated in the retelling, but carry on nevertheless, painting a portrait of village life surrounding this town drunk.
His father once sent him to Rome to be cured, but that plainly didn’t take. Locals either put up with Luciano or mutter under their breath about him, sitting alone, drinking in the inn or taking a bottle out into the fields or forests.
As he walks with shepherd Severino (Severino Sperandio) and his herd of goats, they encounter a locked gate on their way to another pasture. The local prince’s aged castle has long been a short cut, through the outer walls and across the filled-in moat, that shepherds have used. Tipsy Luciano won’t stand for it. He kicks the gate open.
That sets events in motion involving the prince, the two local thugs in soiled police uniforms and Severino’s daughter (Maria Alexandra Lungu), whom Luciano has started courting in secret. He even gives her an amulet of “Etruscan gold” he happened upon in a nearby stream. But her father fears he’ll “ruin her reputation,” and plots against him.
We can hope all we want, but we just know that isn’t going to end well. That’s how Luciano finds himself “extradited” to Argentina, to Tierra del Fuego, the storytelling hunters say. That’s how he winds up in a priest’s vestments leading, pretty much at gunpoint, sailors infected with “gold fever” looking for buried Spanish treasure with the aid of a king crab that he totes in a bucket of salt water.
Perhaps only documentary filmmakers would have the daring to take their crew to one of the most remote and under-filmed places on Earth for their third act. They recreate the (wooden) shipwreck-littered coast, sample the striking topography and capture glimpses of the exotic wildlife. And when the chips are down, they stage an Old West shoot-out on the rocky moonscape every bit as shorn of vegetation as any desert setting in the American Southwest.
I love the way this leisurely, 19th-century-paced film moves from sunny, verdant Tuscany to overcast and forbidding Tierra del Fuego, taking Luciano from heaven to Hell, or at least Purgatory, exiled between the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn.
The tale itself is a sort of parable of drunkenness, “gold fever” and its bloody-mindedness. And if our hero isn’t exactly doing penance, he is at least on his way to something like romantic closure, led by a crab he takes out of the water to periodically show him the way.
Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking
Cast: Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Severino Sperandio and Jorge Prado
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. An Oscilloscope Labs release.
Running time: 1:45
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Film buffs will pick up on this as a sort of “Gloria” role, with Headey as the tough broad who softens when he sees the target is a little boy and his little dog.
Sam Worthington plays the heavy, a good career move on his part.
“9 Bullets” comes our way from Screen Media on April 22.
Well, I’m fresh out of new ways to say “derivative,” “recycled,” “cut-and-pasted” and for old schoolers, “photocopied” or “carbon copy” about a movie without an original thought or image in its makeup.
Looking for suggestions, as “The Long Night” pretty much runs one through the more common possibilities in the first act.
Where’ve we see a city couple menaced by monstrous cultish figures in black cowls with deer, ram, etc. skulls as their head-covering? Where HAVEN’T we seen that?
“Antlers” was merely the one with the big name cast. But I feel as if I see some version of this sort of primeval, nature-worshipping of flesh-craving menace at least once a month.
There’s very little to recommend this Scout Taylor-Compton (“Runaways” is the best rated credit on her resume) and Nolan Gerard Funk (“Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare”) as the New Yorkers who trek “down South” where the Spanish moss hangs off the live oaks and those “redneck art” thingies on the side of the road are “totems” to what they quickly figure out is “some kind of a cult, skinhead or Klan gang.”
Try “snakes.” Because there are a lot of those. Not in the costumes of the cult, mind you. But that’s nitpicking.
Grace has come South to “find out who my family is.” She was a foster child, and there’s a local who claims to have dug up some history. Businessman/Princeton alumnus Jack figures he owes her because he didn’t “stick up for me” when he introduced her to his rich family.
Their phones go staticky, the night turns gloomy and all these dudes wearing animal heads show up with their torches, their pentagrams, their animal mutilation and their supernatural hold over the couple and the one local (veteran character actor Jeff Fahey) who might intervene on their behalf.
There’s one good joke, the punchline to a guys-meet-and-have-a-“Quien es mas macho?” moment.
Deborah Kara Unger shows up, face-painted to hide the embarrassment .
And there are a couple of effective moments, a chill here and there, a canted camera that captures Grace’s possession by whatever “snake” this cult worships.
For those looking for cheaper thrills, there’s a slo-mo pandering moment of nudity later on. Kudos to the star or her body double, there, I guess.
Taylor-Compton also manages the bellow guttural screams at every threat, every exertion, every moment of fear or vengeance Grace experiences. No. Mean. Feat.
The movie before and after that signature nude scene isn’t titillating or the least bit entertaining. But when you’re seemingly reusing costumes from a dozen other animist cult pictures, that was always going to be too much to hope for.
Rating: R (Violence|Language|Some Disturbing Images|Nudity)
Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Nolan Gerard Funk, Jeff Fahey and Deborah Kara Unger.
Credits: Directed by Rich Ragsdale, scripted by Robert Sheppe and Mark Young. A Well Go USA film on Shudder.
“In this game, there’s what you know, an’ what you DON’T know,” grizzled ex-con and OAP (Old Age Pensioner) Terry fumes in “King of Thieves.” And in a line that can be applied to all those too young to appreciate or “get” this old school heist picture, aka the callow critics who panned it, he ads “And if you don’t even know what you don’t know, you know f— all!“
If the very idea of Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, playing a rare late-career tough guy, chewing through those lines in the presence of still-a-little-scaryOscar-winner Michael Caine, doesn’t thrill or at least tickle you, well this isn’t the film for you.
Maybe you have to be older to appreciate the diabetes/UTI/deaf/napping and insulin-injecting with a slap-on-the-bum afterward charms of “Thieves,” which stars those two, and Oscar-nominee Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox (“Daredevil”), Paul Whitehouse (British TV and “Death of Stalin” veteran) and hell’s bells DUMBLEDORE himself, Michael Gambon.
But I dare say even those who panned this perfectly engaging, reasonably suspenseful, nostalgic and even whimsical geriatric burglar’s tale when it had its limited theatrical release would agree with me on one salient point.
Caine plays Brian, a bored, comfortably-retired and just-widowed ringleader (of course) who promised his wife (Francesca Annis) he’d “stay out of mischief” just before she died. That changes basically at her funeral.
There’s Terry (Broadbent) and nervous, “stone-deaf” Kenny (Courtenay). And putting on a show by doing a handstand in the middle of the solemn occasion is “the young one,” Danny (Ray Winstone).
The first thing we notice about this informal “mob” is that they’re elderly, inclined to be a bit loud because of hearing issues, and indiscrete. They start chatting up possible “jobs” just to make small talk into shop talk.
A former protege of Brian’s, the on-the-spectrum shy “Basil” (Cox) overhears this, and mentions to Brian that he has a friend who has a key into one of the most-challenging-“jobs” the lads were discussing. Basil may not like to be in crowds or be touched, but he has access to that diamond distrct key, and he just might be “the best ‘sparks’ man (electronics/security systems) in London.”
All they need to do is get in, pry open this or that, use a disused elevator shaft, drift a hole big enough for “the most undernourished thief we can find” — so they recruit Carl (Whitehouse) — to get through and ransack a safe deposit-box filled vault with diamonds, cash and gold, all while avoiding London’s omnipresent CCTV cameras.
Before the Cockney heir to Caine’s perfect Cockney Winstone can say, “‘ello me old son,” that’s just what they do.
For a movie that’s basically a true-to-life “Going in Style,” “King of Thieves” never crosses the line from “cute” to “cutesy.” Caine gives us a taste of his still-hard-as-nails edge, Broadbent and Winstone match him and the picture’s inevitable “no honor among thieves” story arc clings to credibility, first to last.
The casing-the-joint/assembling-the-team/planning the heist scenes are handled with brisk montages set to period pop by Tom Jones or Shirley Bassey, or a crackling jazz score by Benjamin Wallfisch. He sets the actual break-in sequence — it doesn’t go easily or go off like clockwork, BTW — to an energetic jazz version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.”
The cute stuff has to do with this guy’s “incontinence,” that one’s need for naps, mid-heist and bonding over “Type 2? Diabetes?”
Gambon shows up as an out-of-his depth fishmonger/fence, Billy the Fish. Gambon dresses in worn, oversized pants and sportscoat with the belt cinched up entirely too far…just like grandpa.
Sure, we can figure out the weak links, guess the “alliances” and schisms within the gang before they show up. That’s what a “formulaic” genre picture is. We can figure out where this is going without being native Brits who remember the news stories.
But Oscar-winning director James Marsh (“Man on Wire,” “The Theory of Everything”), working from a Joe Penhall script, wisely limits the police point of view to nameless coppers doggedly burrowing through CCTV footage, hunting for clues.
This high-mileage/hard-mileage cast crackles and sells the conceit, that aged Brits — whom no one would suspect because Britain’s native-born criminal element long ago lost its initiative and its edge to “Albanians” and foreign imports — could pull this off.
And if only Winstone could Cockney his way through a proper mocking of somebody’s disguise — “That’s a proper ‘Uncle Fester, Send-in-the-Clowns’ whoopsie-daisy ‘ave an AWAY day, that is!” — only Caine could serve up the immensely quotable dialogue’s best summation.
“Crooks are like boxers. They lose their legs, first. Then they lose their reflexes. Then they lose their friends.”
Rating: R, for language (profanity)
Cast: Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox, Francesca Annis, Paul Whitehouse, Michael Gambon and Ray Winstone.
Credits: Directed by James Marsh, scripted by Joe Penhall. A Lionsgate/Saban films release on Netflix.
Movie Nation 