Lili Reinhart stars in this drama about a Youtube/Facebook/Twitter company’s last line of defense against snuff films, grooming perverts and the like.
“Remember, we are not censors, we are moderators.”
Thus, the company washes its hands of warped “monsters” and do-nothing cops do nothing because nothing is what they’re good at.
Taking matters into one’s own hands is catnip to a “violence goes viral, always has always will” culture.
Brainstorm has this one. When’s it come out, Brainstorm Media?
A hyped-to-death comedy reboot, a smart horror picture and an animated sequel were no match for Mighty Marvel’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” snore, as that comic book reboot managed another $40 million on its second weekend at the box office.
As “Four” opened with a $117.6 million take last weekend, we’re looking at a 65% fall-off, a STEEP dive for a comic book movie. “Superman,” by comparison, opened slightly higher at $125 million but only fell off 54% (to $58 million and change) its second weekend.
That puts “Fantastic” in the realm of the gone and almost forgotten last “Captain America” installment, “Brave New World,” which opened weaker and also fell off a cliff its second weekend.
It will still clear the $200 million mark by Monday, Tuesday at the latest.
But that’s not even the big box office news. Dreamworks rolling out a sequel to its popular animation “The Bad Guys” should have been money in the box office bank, and then some, what with school being out. Nothing doing. “Bad Guys 2” only clocked $22.2 million. It’s fun, if not quite as jaunty as the first film. Word of mouth on it might help.
That little girl sitting in front of me, repeatedly clapping with glee with several of the her friends at a matinee in South Central Va. Thursday, didn’t get the word out. I guess.
Under ordinary circumstances, “The Bad Guys 2” should be rolling up $50 million+ and winning the weekend. But Dreamworks, like Pixar (“Elio,” etc) has lost some of its unquestioned luster and can’t even sell a sequel to a sleeper that opened with @$24 million and came close to clearing $100.
Killer commercials, slapping Seth MacFarlane’s fading brand onto the title (as a producer, one of many, not a writer or director) isn’t goosing the Liam Neeson reboot of “The Naked Gun.” It’s got Pamela Anderson as a love interest and Danny Huston as a Musk-like heavy and…every funny thing in it is in the trailer. I was complaining to my local theater manager about a cricket infestation in the multiplex after this one. Nobody watching was laughing enough to drown the crickets out. It’s tallied $17 million. Not terrible, but that won’t cover the months of advertising costs this picture generated.
That’s good enough for third place on the first weekend of August, as “Superman” is still making money, another $13.855 million this weekend. The Man of Steel has his first fourth place finish as the dog days of summer set in.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” has another weekend in the top five with an 8.7 $million weekend.
A smart horror film from Neon is maxing out to what smart horror typically draws these days, as “Together” cleared $6.8 million on its opening weekend, $10.85 over five days, as it opened Wednesday. Even horror sequels and reboots have struggled this year, with the blockbuster “Final Destination” proving the exception to that rule.
Maybe “Body horror” scares people off. Or “relationship horror.”
“F1” ($4.1), “I Know What You Did Last Summer” ($2.65), the horror reboot and “Smurfs” ($1.77) exit the top five but not the top ten.
“How to Train Your Dragon” has one last weekend in the top ten ($1.35), as it’s not losing all its audience to “Bad Guys.”
“Elio” or “Lilo & Stitch”exit the top ten.
“Lilo” will not catch “Minecraft” to become the year’s biggest blockbuster — falling a couple of million short ($423-$421 right now). It’s gassed and is losing screens, despite Disney’s best efforts.
And Tom Cruise’s last “Mission: Impossible” outing will end its run short of the $200 million mark, domestically. It’s still in a few theaters but no longer paying its keep, stalling at $197 million as of Sunday night.
Natalie Merchant, the singer and songwriter of “Hey Jack Kerouac” among other hits, thinks that one reads and is swept up by his novel “On the Road” when young because “You’re kid of wired for it in adolescence.”
The actor, sometime biker and onetime long road trip traveler Josh Brolin read Kerouac’s “On the Road” while young and says “I like the impact” the novel had on him “in hindsight.” You’ve got to be young to “get it” and surf its long sentences while tuned in to its wavelength. He won’t re-read it for that reason.
And comic and host of the Emmy winning CNN “Shades of America” series W. Kamau Bell sees “On the Road” as a fine candidate for “The Great American Novel,” with its restlessness, eagerness to explore and move on, exploration and passion for the “freedom” of always going “west, young man.”
Fans of the novel, academics and surviving friends of Kerouac highlight the engaging new documentary appreciation of that seminal “Beat Generation” writer, “Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of America.”
“Capote Tapes” filmmaker Ebs Burnough serves up a reminiscence of Kerouac’s time, life and career that’s more about those famous fans and the wide open vistas of that eternal “road” that Americans crave than a literal account of the man’s life and that one great novel the self-destructive alcoholic had in him.
We learn that Kerouac’s French-Canadian heritage made him an “outsider” who gravitated to other outsiders all his life, of his probable bisexual crush on manic traveling companion Neal Cassady and glimpse the formative WWII events that shaped him. He was in the Merchant Marine for a while.
But his life was far more complicated than anything here suggests.
We pick up on the misogyny, the Civil Rights Era savvy of the novelist’s views about the way Black Americans were treated in the Land of the “Free,” and the irresponsible, roaming no-visible-means-of-support lifestyle that Kerouac and a handful of postwar figures grasped for as the rest of America settled into 1950s conventionality, with its picket fences, good schools, mortgages and a Chevrolet in every driveway that didn’t feature a Ford parked in it.
And we follow what are meant to be three versions of that sort of modern, rootless “Nomadland” American — a New Orleans couple who sold their house to see the USA in their Mercedes van-home, a retiree with a camping trailer she and her dog tour America in and a Philly teen restless to get out of town, start college in Atlanta and get on with his real life.
Interesting as these people are, not all of those analogies work or fit the role Burnough tries to give them here.
News footage of the day, a famous appearance on “The Steve Allen Show” and even home movies of Kerouac help recreate the milieu and the handsome writer in it. Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, the writer Joyce Johnson notes that for all the restlessness Jack “always had a destination in mind” when he set out on his famous road trips. The trips were adventures. It was just that the “destinations” that let him down.
Jazz man, Kerouac pal and keeper of the flame David Amran helps flesh out the portrait. A Kerouac biographer who met Kerouac in his final years offers insights into the self-destruction. And the novelist Jay McInerney — whose “Bright Lights, Big City” was a sort of ’80s generational snapshot inspired by Kerouac’s example — talks up the quality of the prose and the “myth” of how “authentically” the novel was researched (essentially Kerouac transcribing road trips with assorted real life characters, some made famous by the book) and how quickly the novel was written on speed and typed onto a roll of teletype paper — which overwhelm the craft and quality of the prose.
And one Gen X wag appearing here repeatedly refers to the “1957 America” Kerouac was depicting in the novel, when he wrote the damned thing in ’51 about events covering the very late 1940s. When the book was published in ’57, the Beats were on the verge of being figures of nostalgia, Kerouac himself was a high mileage 35 year-old and the roads, the jazz/Slim Gaillard/New York-New Orleans-San Francisco “scene” captured on his pages were already out of date.
But that made the novel timeless the moment it finally hit print.
Reviewing the film as a journalist who had “The Kerouac House” beat for a time in Orlando, where Kerouac wrote “The Dharma Bums,” I could appreciate the slick, brisk, fanboyish treatment that “Kerouac’s Road” gives its subject. It’s an entertaining overview.
But the Obama White House alum who directed it goes a bit too gaga for celebrities, even if Kerouac fan Matt Dillon has a pretty good bead on what sudden “fame” could do to a struggling writer who finally makes it.
“It’s not like a perfect book,” Dillon says of the Benzedrine-fueled road narrative. “But here we are, all these years later, talking about it.”
Mixed bag or not, films like “Keroauc’s Road” feed on the novel and the novelist’s mythology. And when they’re on their game, they get at what Kerouac’s sensory-overload novel tapped into that is quintessentially American — mercurial restlessness, eagerness to live a life less ordinary and that core realization that staying in one place — even a New York, New Orleans or Los Angeles — is no way to get to where you want to go.
Rating: unrated, some profanity, gay and gender slurs
Cast: David Amran, Joyce Johnson, Natalie Merchant, W. Kamau Bell, Amir Staten, Jay McInerney, Diane Langley, Matt Dillon, and Michael Imperioli reading the words of Jack Kerouac.
Credits: Directed by Ebs Burnough, scripted by Eliza Hindmarch. A Universal Pictures release.
Running time: 1:31
The sometimes-excruciating existential pain of “coupling” becomes physical torture — played-for-laughs — in the darkly comical “Together,” a bloody “body horror” rom-com about commitment.
Writer-director Michael Shanks, making his feature directing debut, pairs up Allison Brie and Dave Franco as a grounded teacher and a too-old-to-rock’n roll commitment-phobic man-child and puts them through a terminal, supernatural test that would drive any couple apart — surgically.
Millie and Tim are New Yorkers who leave “the city” so she can take a job teaching at a rural upstate middle school. He’s clinging to New York and his rock dreams, putting off facing reality as long as he can, taking what gigs come his way, anything to keep a foothold in “the city.” She’s clinging in other ways.
And when she proposes in the middle of their NYC going away party, Tim’s hesitation have her girlfriends clucking and Millie gritting her teeth. No, they “haven’t been on the same page for a while.” She dangles the prospect of them splitting up to him. He grasps for an apology.
“I f—–g suck!”
The older house they move into smells, and Tim proves useful in instantly tracking that stink down. His “dad’s toolbox?” With all the cutting tools? That’s “Foreshadowing 201” in film school, kids.
Because all it takes is a hike gone wrong, a tumble into a subterranean temple of some sort, with a root-tangled horror-movie pool straight out of “Alien.” As we’ve seen search dogs drop into this same spot, with grisly results, in the story’s prologue, we have an idea of what’s coming.
Things start happening, first to him, then to her. There’s “the pull, the thirst in our bones” that seems to be drawing them together. Literally. Lying together gets them “stuck” together. And sex? Try not to imagine what you know they’re going to experience and the movie is going to show you about that “uncoupling.”
Shanks sets the table for his leads to swap brittle digs, a couple who switch places in who’s clinging to whom. Little resentments grow into schisms, but whatever’s happening to them leaves no safe margin for that. They’re “Together” unless they take drastic, physical “body horror” steps to separate.
This is all depicted in dark and delicious eyes-averting detail.
Brie and Franco know how to find their way from grim to funny. The laughs come in their deadpan underreactions and freaked-out over-reactions at their plight.
It’s too bad it all turns rather conventional in the third act, with lots of unnecessary “explaining” and the like.
But “Together” is a smart, intimate horror picture in a year that’s seen a few of those, and the horror audience staying home for the most part. If you’re a fan, this is one you want to see in a theater. Because nobody should see and laugh at the grim goings on in “Together” alone.
Rating: R, bloody images, violence, painfully explicit sex, profanity
Cast: Allison Brie, Dave Franco, Mia Morrissey and Damon Herriman
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Shanks. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:42
The hot talk around the pool, on the beach and in the Back to School sales this weekend has to be about the “Bad Guys” sequel.
“Wasn’t it cool when…How about when the snake swallowed his girlfriend’s FACE…When the piranha FARTED in his space suit>”
What 6-9 year old could resist it?
These super slick animal kingdom riffs on “Reservoir Dogs” and “Mission: Impossible” are a hoot. And if “The Bad Guys 2” isn’t as hilarious as “Bad Guys 1,” it’s still got lots of giggles provided by a steller, comical voice cast providing a big part of the soundtrack to some genuine Tex Avery style eyeball-popping, gonzo, in-your-face animation.
The Bad Guys — Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Awkwafina, Anthony Ramos and Craig Robinson voicing Mr. Wolf, Mr. Snake, Ms. Tarantula, Mr. Piranha and Mr. Shark — went “good” in their last picture, remember. But that’s rendered the robbers/hackers/masters-of-disguise unemployable.
Mr. Wolf pines for the foxy cat burglar turned fox-Governor Foxington (Zazie Beetz) and tries to find work with all the museums, banks, etc. that he’s robbed. “We’re GOOD guys, now.” No dice.
“People DO want to trust you. You just have to give them a reason!”
With the evil guinea pig Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade, a hoot) in prison — and bulked up like a real con when we see him — who’s to blame when new crimes blow up again? Who can be framed for wrecking an epic Lords of Lucha Mexican wrestling championship?
The police chief turned Commissioner (Alex Borstein) lives by her coffee mug’s motto — “I See Guilty People.” She rushes to judgement.
But something’s going on with all this MacGuffinite (Hitchcock fans will snort) being heisted. Can the good guys be blackmailed into going bad again by slinky Kitty (Danielle Brooks), her Slavic warthog muscle Pigtail (Maria Bakalava) and the Snake charming hawk Susan (Natasha Lyonne) and figure out what’s what?
Because these tricksters have something HUGE in mind.
The plot is a “Goldfinger” meets “Moonraker” Bond film mashup with room for wrestling, robbing the MoonX space oligarch Mr. Moon (Colin Jost) and comical chases and brawls from the mean streets all the way into outer space.
I love the way these pictures mimic classic “capers” by giving each character a stand alone moment — the smitten, kombucha-drinking, “Namaste” speaking Snake (Maron) mooning over a girlfriend (Lyonne) with each new sign of her treachery, Awkwafina popping off the tech-nerd speak right up to the moment they can’t get the spacecraft hatch to open.
“Are you KIDDING me? It’s LEFTY LOOSIE!”
And Robinson’s shark presides over a wedding, so you know he’s brought his keyboards for a little singing call-and-response preaching.
The Oscar-winning Rockwell’s vulpine cool sets the tone for these pictures, and that gives the animators license for one visually witty set-up after another.
The Luchadores tourney is a veritable feast of comical cultural cliches about Mexican and Mexican-American (a parking lot of all-low-riders) — visually hilarious, right up to the edge of offensive.
But putting a piranha (Ramos) with a farts-when-he’s-nervous condition into a spacesuit, crammed in there with a snake?
What seven year old would want to be the last on the block to catch that?
Rating: PG, action violence, “rude humor” (fart jokes) and mild profanity
Cast: The voices of Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina, Zazie Beetz, Marc Maron, Anthony Ramos, Craig Robinson, Danielle Brooks, Maria Bakalava, Alex Borstein, Lilly Singh, Natasha Lyonne, Colin Jost and Richard Ayoade.
Credits: Directed by Pierre Pirefel and JP Sans, scripted by Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen, based on the books by Aaron Blabley. A Dreamworks/Universal release.
Running time: 1:44
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” and “The Naked Gun” reboot starring Liam-Neeson-not-Leslie-Nielsen passes by in 85 minutes, credits to credits. So, “Mission: Accomplished?”
Alas, there are maybe 20 minutes worth of jokes, sight-gags, slapstick bits and innuendo in those 85 minutes. An honest review reaching for brevity could be as short as “All the funny bits are in the trailers.”
But Neeson seemed like an inspired piece of casting — an Irish bruiser who has become the AARP tough guy for his generation of screen stars. He’s paired up with Pamela Anderson, and they click on camera and off, if the buzz is to be believed. Danny Huston, playing the messianic Muskish oligarch heavy, seems genuinely wrong-footed by every stupid thing said to him by any other character.
“Do you mind if I speak freely?”
“I prefer English.”
One doesn’t appreciate how hard it is to write these movies, and the “Scary Movie” parodies that they inspired, until you run into one that doesn’t play. You throw a lot of gags at the wall and hope enough stick to make the picture pay off. Here, they only threw enough to make the effort seem half-hearted.
But as we grin at the mind-altering gadget at the heart of the story, the “P.L.O.T. Device,” as we chuckle at a last sight-gag written in script on the side of a police cruiser — “To Warm and Serve,” and note the weeping children shoved through the Police Squad precint by a cop holding their lemonade stand sign in his hands, and grimace at the widely acknowledged truth spoken in jest — “Since when do cops have to follow the law?” the thought does occur that maybe these movies ended at the right time — decades ago.
The laughs are harder to come by, the earnestness harder to fake.
Everything about this feels played. And the legions of seniors who keep “Cops are always right” shows like “Blue Bloods” and the endless image-burnishing BS of the Dick Wolf stable of “Law & F.B.I. & Chicago P.D.” programs and their spinoffs on the air don’t go to the movies. The boilerplate procedurals of this generation are beyond parody.
Love Neeson, and mazeltov to him and Anderson, but there’s a reason he doesn’t land a lot of comedies. CCH Pounder as the “chief,” hounding her lawless minions to police by the rules and Huston are casting coups.
But nobody has enough funny things to say or do, and supporting players Paul Walter Hauser and Kevin Duran, the bleached-blond henchman of the oligarch, are just place-holder players here.
Once you’ve seen Neeson is a too-short schoolgirl’s skirt stabbing a bank robber with a lolipop, you’ve gotten the joke. It’s a pity that tried to make a whole movie to go with that trailer.
Rating: PG-13, violence, innuendo, profanity
Cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, CCH Pounder and Danny Huston
Credits: Directed by Akiva Shaffer, scripted by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand and Akiva Shaffer, based on the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker TV series “Police Squad.” A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:25
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
Movie Nation 