Gorge on sushi, triple feature at the multiplex. That’s living.
“The Bad Guys II” because who doesn’t want to see what all the eight year olds will be calling “Cool” at the pool?
The Horror Pic of the week. From Neon. “Together.” The ultimate body horror rom com?
And Liam Neeson in the role he was born to inherit. Did he also get Leslie Nielsen whoopie cushion for good “Naked Gun” luck?
Surely that’s the case.
Let’s find out. And stop calling.me Shirley.
“Hola, Frida” is a charming animated imagining of the early years of the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Adapted from a book by Sophie Faucher, this Canadian/Quebecois production takes the tidbit that Kahlo had an imaginary friend as a little girl and fancifully spins that into a tale of a tough, creative and unconventional girl whose early life shaped the artist and icon she became.
Hobbled by illness and literally stalked by “La Muerta” — death — Frida didn’t let physical challenges or sexist Mexican parochialism break her spirit or limit her creativity. Filmmakers Karine Vézina and André Kadi tell this adult-friendly children’s story in the colors of Kahlo, recreating the culture she grew up in and the heritage she embraced, reminding us that she was a lot more than a famous face — her favorite subject — with one long eyebrow.
Six year-old Frida and younger sister Christina are doted on by Matilde, their mestiza mother and Guillermo, their German-Jewish photographer dad in La Casa Azul in Coyoacán. She plays with a pet monkey and feeds a stray dog and shows her first drawings — of The Coyote Fountain — to her classmates, not all of whom are art lovers.
Visits to the market are where her mother tells her of her ancient Zapotec heritage, the pre-Aztec/pre-Colombian “cloud people” whose descendents wear colorful traditional clothes and flowers in their hair.
Then Frida gets sick — “polio.” Her father tries to find things to distract her as she recovers from fever and finds herself burdened with a leg brace for what her crueller classmates call her withered “chicken leg.”
“I don’t WANNA take my mind off things,” she rightly protests. She draws and revels in the company of the stray dog her little sister smuggles in to her.
The cloud visages of her cloud people? They weep for her. And that skeletal ghoul who lingers at her bedside? That’s “La Muerta,” who has come for her. But thanks to the pleas of Frida’s invisible friend, La Muerta takes a rain check.
Frida recovers enough to resolve to “become a doctor,” a profession women were only just getting into in Mexico, so that she can “heal people,” like her epileptic father and herself.
In her dreams, she meets with her imaginary friend and gets sage advice when, for instance, she falls into quicksand. That’s just “fear and doubt dragging you down,” she’s told. Her dad, who photographs her even in her lowest moments, teaches her that art can “shine a light on the sad moments in our lives.”
Her mother may disapprove of her desire to wear pants and men’s suits. But we see the unconventional artist taking shape, all of it captured in the early notebook that the adult Frida flips through and reminisces about from her wheelchair.
Our filmmakers may invent a roller skating race for the child to compete in, but they don’t shy away from showing a little girl in pain and misery, bullied but refusing to be limited by the hand nature dealt her and the provincial culture she could celebrate once she overcame its sexism.
The animation has an early “Dora the Explorer” simplicity blended with a Kahlo color palette that gives this delightful film kid-appeal, a movie small children will enjoy and learn from that their art-history fan parents can appreciate as well.
Rating: unrated, worthy of PG
Cast: The voices of Layla Tuy Sok, Lucinda Davis, Angela Gallupo, Marcel Jeannin, Eleanor Noble, Holly Gauthier-Frankle, Robert Naylor and Frankie Bowen.
Credits: Directed by Karine Vézina and André Kadi, scripted by Anne Bryan, Sophie Faucher and André Kadi, based on a book by Sophie Faucher.
Running time: 1:23
James Sweeney wrote, directed and co-stars as the gay man who befriends our protagonist at an “I lost my twin” support group.
Lauren Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) would like to help.
But there’s more to twinless Roman (O’Brian) than meets the eye and things could be more complicated than they look.
Sept. 5.
“Sketch” is a children’s film, a “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Where the Wild Things Are” variation about a child’s fantasy life — angry, monstrous drawings sketched in reaction to grief — invading her real world.
Aspiring artist Amber (Bianca Belle) isn’t the only one bending reality to cope with the loss of her mother. Her older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) has dreamed up an enchanted pond in the woods behind their house where broken things are magically mended. So he’s toting around Mom’s ashes, apparently with the notion of bringing her back.
That pond isn’t the sort of place to drop a notebook of surreal, Minecraft-inspired monster sketches.
Their Dad (Tony Hale) is lost in his own grief, selling their house with the aid of his sister (D’Arcy Carden) to escape the memories. The realtor-sister advice about depersonalizing the house — no pictures with “faces” in them left out for prospective buyers to see — may be common practice, but it plays as another cruel reminder to dad Taylor every time he helps “stage” it for another showing.
Neither of them is prepared when the monsters come to Maple Street. Or Ash or Oak or wherever.
That’s not wholly original, especially the “Minecraft” verbal and visual references. But it’s a promising enough comical kids’ movie premise. How do you combat these monsters? You sketch fanciful weapons. If the Eye-der (eyeball spider) monsters were sketched in chalk, stump them to dust or wash them away. Crayon? Wax melts if you “flamethrower” it.
But the execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…
Every so often — once a year, maybe once every other year — a modest budget (the effects are digitally simple here) film goes into release that has soundtrack problems that a major studio production would have corrected in post-production.
“Sketch” goes into theaters the lacking looping time it would have taken to give the kids a shot at making their dialogue intelligible. Sure, you keep the take where they hit their marks. There’s even some acting (not much) in evidence — in the action scenes if not the emotional ones. One punchline lands.
“How are you going to get ‘it’ to chase you,” the teasing punk Bowan (Kalon Cox) whom Amber has a crush on is asked?
“By doing what I do best — being a huge B-hole!”
Mumbled lines might have been invented by Brando and aren’t solely a problem with child actors. But when the dialogue is rushed through and the word-emphasis in sentences is consistently botched, your quirky, off-key action comedy starts to play as surreal — or filmed in Dutch without subtitles.
“Sketch” needed to have huge patches of kid dialogue looped just to get the back story, exposition and character names straight in the viewers’ mind. It’s so bad that I had to switch to headphones to try and parse out the words reviewing it after the mystifying mumbling of the early scenes.
Any good performance by a child in a film is a minor miracle, and the great ones stick with you. But those kids are rarely “born with it.” They’ve been trained.
Lots of people think their beautiful little darling was born to show off, “act” and work her or his way from community theater to the big or small screen.
But stage parents who come up with a catchy stage name, find an agent and getting bookings for a kid who maybe hasn’t progressed beyond local kiddie productions of “Shrek! The Musical Jr” or “101 Dalmatians Jr.” would be a lot better served by getting them elocution lessons.
And maybe ask any director casting for a movie if he’s got the budget for looping in post-production.
Rating: PG, comical violence, mild profanity
Cast: Tony Hale, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox, Randa Newman and D’Arcy Carden
Credits: Scripted and directed by Seth Worley. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:33
Six words — “The Deadliest Wildfire in California History.”
Three other words — Paul Freakin’ GREENGRASS.
The “United 93” director tackles a story of 2018’s school bus ride through Hell.
Sept. 19, in theaters.
A24 releasing this in November suggests they consider the picture, with Callum Turner and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar bait.
Classic Broadway lovers should be chomping at the bit for this Lorenz Hart on the verge of stage immortality with perhaps the greatest Broadway show of them all.
Andrew Scott is his writing partner Richard Rodgers, Simon Delaney is Oscar Hammerstein II, Patrick Kennedy is the writer’s writer E.B. White and Qualley is a woman Hart — possibly gay — had a romantic correspondance with in the days leading up to “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day.
The director? Richard Linklater, of “Boyhood,” “Dazed and Confused” and most pertinently “Me and Orson Welles.”
Oct. 24
“She Rides Shotgun” is a gripping A-list B-movie, a morally ambigious and illogically logical thriller for our amoral, illogical times.
Based on a novel by Ben Harper, Nick Rowland’s film grabs a solid, time-proven scenario — a child, on the lam and in jeopardy with a dangerous man — and decorates it with showdowns, chases, who-can-you-trust quandaries, to-the-death brawls and shootouts.
In cinema shorthand, it’s a less gonzo “The Professional,” just as moving as “Gloria” and as troubling as a “A Perfect World.”
A nine-year old waits for her ride after school in wintry New Mexico. Her mom is late. Very late. And she’s damned wary of that guy who rolls up in a beater and shouts “You come over here. I just need to talk to you.”
It turns out, that guy is Nathan, her dad (Taron Egerton, pitch-perfect). “Everything’s fine,” he assures her. But he “just got out.” And little Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) isn’t taking anything he says at face value.
She picks up on clues. Her dad is wearing her stepdad’s jacket. The safety glass of the driver’s side window is shattered and sprinkled all over the car
“What have you done to Mom?”
“I haven’t done ANYTHING!”
As we suspect, that’s not entirely true. As they hit the highway, ditch the beater and duck into a cash-only motel, Polly gets her answers. Her parents are dead. There’s a manhunt for her dad.
But as Dad makes frantic calls to one “friend” after another with “I gotta get gone” desperation, we and Polly pick up on the truth. Dad did something that caused the “double homicide” on the TV news, but he didn’t do it himself.
That “A” in a circle tattooed on his neck he got in prison? That’s the Aryan Steel gang. Nathan did something to cross them, and now he’s got a “green light” on him and everyone he holds dear. His advice is blunt and dire, even if it doesn’t go much beyond how to defend yourself with a baseball bat.
“You gotta feel week to get strong…If they’ve hurt people, cracking their heads is not a sin.”
Rob Yang of TV’s “Succession” and “American Rust” plays a police detective on the hunt who figures out this “green light” business early on. How might that tie into the region’s meth wars, the sprawling meth lab they call “Slabtown” and the “God of Slabtown” who runs it?
Egerton is wound up tight as Nathan, but young Miss Heger (“Things Heard & Scene,” TV’s “Life in Pieces”) has to bounce from shocked and sad to confused and distracted to wholly engaged in their enterprise and what must be done to get away, if indeed “getting away” is her best destiny. She’s quite good in the part and makes a scripted character arc that could give you whiplash at least somewhat plausible.
I mean, the kid’s just lost her mother. It should take more than a few hours to get over that.
The many hands in the screenplay serve up a sea of dirty sheriff’s deputies and filthy police with the rare “good” apple, flinty banter about “peckerwood” white supremacist gangs that lord it over law enforcement (David Lyons and the always formidable John Carroll Lynch play cops) and a finale that is cliched mayhem.
It isn’t “The Professional,” Rowland (“Calm with Horses”) isn’t Luc Besson — his pacing’s slack, for starters — and Heger probably won’t turn out to be the next Natalie Portman.
But she’s pretty good and “She Rides Shotgun” is a compelling, gripping B-movie ride, a picture that reaches for highfalutin “Trojan Horse” allegories when what it does best is a lot more obvious. It puts a child we instantly empathize with in jeopardy, and makes us wonder if gangs, cops or her dad are the biggest threat to her well-being.
Rating: R
Cast: Taron Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, Odessa A’zion, David Lyons and John Carroll Lynch
Credits: Directed by Nick Rowland, scripted by Jordan Harper, Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski and Nick Rowland, based on a novel by Harper. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:00
So, “Das Boat” with a tank?
This looks pretty cool, a timely reminder that heroism is wasted when you’re fighting on behalf of Nazis.
Sept. 18.
Ok, I laughed a couple of times.
Relieved that Questlove didn’t buy in as a new drummer.
Sept. 12, The Tap is ON.
Movie Nation 