Someday, not someday soon, but someday the phrase “lockdown rom-com” will be alien to a generation that never had to improvise around a life and love life suddenly shut in and limited by a global pandemic.
Here’s a cute-looking relic of that not-bygone era, a sort of “SXSW Special” pairing up a “Bad Education” supporting player and “Deadpool’s” favorite cabbie.
Cinedigm unleashed “7 Days” on March 25.
What A24 is to challenging, arty cinema, Well Go USA is to the coolest action from Asia.
It’s their brand and they rarely disappoint.
“Spiritwalker” comes to various platforms April 24.
In “Gasoline Alley,” Devon Sawa plays an ex-con tattoo artist who’s sure he’s being framed for a quadruple homicide in that corner of Tifton, Georgia that looks nothing like Southern California, which is where the story is set.
Sawa’s ex-con is sounding out an actor/friend (Kenny Wormald) on the set of some crap TV series called “American Siege” when an ex-con mechanic on set wonders if “this guy” is bothering him.
The moment the cons amusingly establish each other’s prison bonafides, Jimmy Jayne (Sawa) turns to Roy (Billy Jack Harlow) to ask for his card. “Got a ’66 Chevelle with a sticky clutch,” he explains.
It’s a rare light scene that more or less comes off in a movie where such moments die of loneliness. And nobody on that set — not the star, Sawa, not Harlow, who is Southern and should know better, and not writer-director Edward Drake, who directed Harlow and Bruce Willis in a “real” movie called “American Siege” last year, not a stunt driver, script supervisor, a transportation chief or a single Georgia production assistant — had the wherewithal to correct that blunder.
We’ve seen the pimped-out Chevelle. We see it again when it is hurled into the last place a vintage Chevelle SS with oversized rims belongs, an offroad car chase. And it’s plainly a ’71, which looks almost nothing like the double-headlight ’66 our “hero” is supposed to be driving.
That’s a stupid thing to fixate on, but it’s indicative of the class of movie Bruce Willis is collecting a check a month to appear in these days. “Gasoline Alley” is lifeless, formulaic hackwork created by people who might think they know where to put a camera, but have no business conjuring up stories, creating characters or writing dialogue that sounds like the speech of native English speakers.
Sawa’s tattoo artist is nosing around, trying to clear his name after a hooker (Irina Antonenko) he met in a bar turns up dead, with three other hookers. Willis plays one of the detectives on the case, the one without many lines.
Luke Wilson tries to make the swaggering, drawling chatterbox lead detective worth listening to. Det. Vargas is supposed to be on the ball, updating their chief suspect on the progress of the case they’re building against him, making threats.
They’re going to escort Jimmy to the “electric chair,” he promises. “It’s like that old Gospel number, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.'”
I guess that’s supposed to be a joke because A), it’s a classic of the American Songbook, from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” and B), I’ve interviewed Luke Wilson a few times, and he’s not stupid enough to leave that line be if he isn’t trying to be funny.
I get a sense, from the scenes where all three actors appear, that the other two are there to prop up Willis, who seems unfocused, the sort of participant in the project who can’t even feign interest in most of the scenes he’s in.
Whatever rumors one hears about Willis’s health these days, unless he’s working for the insurance he really is doing a number on his legacy in movies like this.
“Gasoline Alley” takes its name from a tattoo shop where virtually nobody shows up to get inked, leaving Jimmy plenty of time to ask around, get in fights and draw attention to assorted people, most of whom end up dead after he’s questioned them.
The one car chase is somewhat short of half-assed. And there’s one fight that looks real because the actors are actually in it and the choreography has a lot more wrestling, kicking and hair-pulling than roundhouse-punching movie fights typically offer.
Sawa sucks down a lot of smokes, wears a lot of black and gives the lead role a good old college try. But the lifeless script, the aimlessness that drifts from scene to scene and the eye-rolling cliche of a payoff and finale give away a movie that’s running on fumes, not ideas.
And the best reason for everybody else to collect a check for it is that no one will remember anything except Bruce Willis was in it, he was bad and the picture was worse.
Rating: R for violent content, drug use, language throughout and some sexual content
Cast: Devon Sawa, Luke Wilson, Kat Foster, Sufe Bradshaw, Kenny Wormald, Irina Antonenko and Bruce Willis.
Credits: Directed by Edward Drake, scripted by Tom Sierchio and Edward Drake. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:37
I’m about to sit down to review the first Bruce Willis movie of March. And as far as I can tell, the next film with him in it is six weeks away. But as prolific as he’s being, turning up in one B-movie after another, you never know.
The sequel to last year’s “Fortress,” “Fortress: Sniper’s Eye” reunites BW with his “Fortress” co-star, Jesse Metcalfe.
Bruce may narrate, but most of the action’s involving Metcalfe and Chad Michael Murray.
This one opens April 29.
The “cell phone thriller” has been around at least since the rise of screenwriter William Monahan, who perfected the script that only requires one “star” on the set at a time with “The Departed” and “Body of Evidence.”
Somewhere tonight, Monahan’s sitting in a Boston bar grousing “Hey I was getting there” as “The Desperate Hour” arrives in theaters. Here’s a movie that has just two stars — Naomi Watts and her character’s iPhone.
Phillip Noyce may be far removed from his peak years, when “Dead Calm” and “Patriot Games,” “Rabbit Proof Fence,” “The Quiet American” and “Salt” made him the most in-demand director of thrillers Australia has ever produced. But give him Naomi Watts, park her in the woods on a run with an iPhone, and damned if he doesn’t get a tight, engrossing “ticking clock” thriller out of that myopic scenario.
“The Desperate Hour” is a near real-time tale of a widow who gets her little girl onto the bus, rousts her disaffected teen son out of bed and takes a “personal day” to go for a run.
But as she jogs through the woods (the film was shot in northern Ontario), multi-tasking pleas from her little girl, errands from traveling parents and appointments, she gets a clue…or five…that maybe that “Siri, ‘do not disturb‘” command was a bit premature.
Police cars hurtle past her on the back road she’s running down — first one, then groups of two and three.
By the time the emergency alert comes over, a little guilt should be kicking in with a growing sense of panic. Something’s happening at her kid’s school. Which kid? Oh no, it’s the HIGH school?
“Desperate Hour” is what we pass with Amy, out in the woods, on trails and dirt roads, using everything that an iPhone can deliver — information, a long contacts list to plow through for “What have you heard?” updates from friends and other intermediaries with eyes on the school, navigation, ride sharing, social media research, live streaming video from “the scene” via local TV news, and 911.
That’s a number Amy proceeds to wear out over the frantic hour or so in which this “incident” unfolds.
The average viewer is going to pick up on a lot of things here that don’t mesh with reality. Amy’s got mad iPhone skillz, able to pop from screen shots and social media postings by her son and others to calls, calls upon calls, text exchanges and the aforementioned “live” video. But what stands out about her dizzying directory of dials is how unfailingly polite one and all are, how indulgent each and every cop, parent, mechanic, co-worker, kid and school secretary are of this demanding, pleading crazy lady on the other end of the line.
Only one person hung up on her? Oh. Right. Canada. Well, the setting feels like the more school-shooting crazed US, but you can see how the screenwriter, cast and crew might be confused.
If she’s not badgering the school and the SAME 911 operator over and over, Amy’s hassling the auto body shop where she’s supposed to pick up her parents’ car, because the shop is across the street from the school.
Call after call begins with “C.J. I need you to do something for me.” She’s pestering a parent of an injured child at the hospital, doing detective work about which vehicles the cops have been searching on school property through the aforementioned “C.J.” and generally rolling over whatever lockdown protocols the school and the cops have in place.
This, along with Amy’s lack of curiosity and alarm at being passed by a fleet of cop cars falls under “stupid stuff you have to half-ignore to enjoy this movie.”
Watts is unsurprisingly affecting as a woman growing over more frantic at the Lyft driver who can’t get to her, the teen whose radio silence is alarming on several levels and the helplessness any parent would feel, standing outside the school or “40 minutes away” as Amy always seems to be. She experiences this entire incident via phone.
“What’s that? What’s that noise?”
Watts lets us see a modern, cell-savvy woman who can work a problem, lunging from instant-question to instant-answer or new request, to being scared witless at the sad, bitter videos she sees her son has posted since the death of his father the previous year.
And Noyce heightens our pulse rate and our connection to Amy’s impotent desperation by circling her with a hand-held camera, emphasizing her isolation, playing up her gasping efforts to get to the school or get someplace where somebody can pick her up.
Yes, “Desperate Hour” has a whiff of “the longest, slickest iPhone ad ever.” There are plenty of “Who would DO that? What cop would ALLOW this?” And “What the hell is she THINKING?” about the film.
But as Watts hyperventilates, checks navigation for the nearest major road and pieces together, in her head, what’s really going on, I bought in. As Noyce and Watts bulldoze through lapses in logic, protocols or just plain common sense, I got more invested.
Whatever the “logic” of the piece, Noyce makes every limitation the scenario presents him with an asset.
No, it’s not a reinvention of the “ticking clock” thriller. But an expert director, a good actress, arresting settings and a sense of genuine urgency make “The Desperate Hour” pass in what feels like a breathless 45 minutes.
And “iPhone ad” or not, watching Watts power through this picture with nothing jogging togs and Apple’s pride and joy has me sold. Maybe I’ve bought my last Android after all.
Rating: PG-13 for thematic content and some strong language
Cast: Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Andrew Chown
Credits: Directed by Phillip Noyce, scripted by Chris Sparling. A Roadside Attractions/Vertical release.
Running time: 1:25
A hijacking case re-opened, an “inside job” suspected, “a mole” back in “Vienna.”
This thriller opens April 8.
This one looks t’be a wee hoot.
Style and stabbing and is that one of “The Commitments” waving her scissors and accent around?
“Deadly Cuts” comes our way March 11.
Filmmakers don’t get brownie points for sticking close to formula when tackling a genre picture. But if they did, Kim Farrant could collect hers for “The Weekend Away,” a solid if generally predictable and melodramatic “bad things come to those who vacation” thriller.
“Weekend” is a Leighton Meester star vehicle based on Sarah Alderson’s scripted adaptation of her novel. Our “Gossip Girl” veteran plays an American expat unhappily-married and living in London, a new mother who could use a few days off.
Her just-divorced hellcat pal Kate (Christina Wolfe) thus summons Beth to a Croatian getaway. A little girl-bonding, sight-seeing and dressing up to paint the town red…or as red as Beth, who is still breast-feeding, will allow. But Kate, determined to “find the limit” on her ex’s credit card, won’t hear of it.
One black-out blur of a night later, Beth wakes up to find Kate missing, blood on the floor, Kate’s locked phone left behind and Croatian cops (Amar Bukvic, Iva Mihalić) who’re 50 Shades Disinterested in this “case.”
Beth has to put off the husband back home (Luke Norris), ignore “that’s just like Kate” cracks from her friend’s ex (Parth Thakerar) and the dismissals of the cops, and rely on the Syrian refugee taxi driver (Ziad Bakri) who picked her up at the airport to help her retrace that night and what might have happened to “my best friend.”
The plot serves up a smorgasbord of possibilities and suspects — exes and “escorts,” creeper hotelier and entirely-too-careless cop. Meester isn’t particularly good at selling the “Maybe Beth did it” angle, thanks to the heat of the “I could never DO that” protests she manages.
Our leading lady summons up just enough paranoia to pull off a convincing breakdown under grief, despair and dismay.
But too much of “The Weekend Away” plays like a walk-through before the AD actually yells “ACTION.” The chases, fights and get-aways have a half-speed quality, as if everybody’s scared of getting hurt or working up too much of a sweat before Take Two.
This is most obvious in Meester, whose Beth doesn’t show the strain or effort it would take to get away here or to entrap a “suspect” there.
She’s always made a likeable if somewhat low-heat lead, and she leans a little too hard into this “exhausted new mom” back story to let this movie get up to speed and give us a sense of rising stakes.
The plot works its way past red herrings and into anti-climaxes, never quite drowning in melodrama, but coming damned close, time and again.
That makes for a “Weekend” that gets away from one and all, rather than delivering the roundhouse punch surprises the genre cries out for and the formula demands.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drugs
Cast: Leighton Meester, Christina Wolfe, Ziad Bakri, Amar Bukvic, Iva Mihalić and Luke Norris
Credits: Directed by Kim Farrant, scripted by Sarah Alderson, based on her novel. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:31
The advertising standee dominated a hallway of my favorite cineplex for what seemed like years and years.
“The Accidental Husband” was an Uma Thurman rom-com — her last shot at that genre — co-starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, taking one more stab at mimicking that Gerard Butler “action” and “rom-com” career model. It co-starred Mister Rom-Com and future Oscar winner Colin Firth, and Isabella Rossellini, Sam Shepard and even “2001” survivor Keir Dullea.
And the reason that larger-than-life stand-up poster blocked a big chunk of the crown jewel in the Regal Cinemas chain for so long is that everything that could go wrong with a movie post-production did. Well, aside from the finished negative being destroyed in a fire, I guess.
Producing dilettante Bob Yari put this multi-writer project, directed by to-the-manner-born actor turned director Griffin Dunne into production, and was set to release it under his own start-up banner when all went bust. It showed up in Britain and sat in cinema limbo in the US until going straight to video. A few people reviewed it in 2009-10, and it dropped out of sight.
It’s worth holding an inquest over because what we see on the screen isn’t excruciating, even if there is a cringeworthy quality to the very idea of it and indeed to Dunne’s entire woebegone career behind the camera.
The premise seems borrowed from a Dolly Parton comedy of the last century — “Straight Talk.” Thurman plays a glib New York radio “advice” hostess, the author of “R.E.A.L. Love,” a self-help book titled for the facile “test” everybody should apply to a potential mate before saying “I do.”
Is that partner “Respectable,” “Adult,” “Loving,” etc. Yeah, it’s kind of sexist, but women are her audience, so OK.
Dr. Emma turns that “test” on caller Sofia (Justina Machado), who is about to marry NYC fireman Patrick (Morgan), prompting Sofia to bail and her hunky, handsome and possibly even “respectable,” “adult” and “loving” fiance has to hear this on the radio on his way home from a soccer match.
A few tipsy nights later, he’s talked the hacker-son of the extended Indian clan that runs the restaurant he lives upstairs from (Sarita Choudhury and Ajay Naidu among them) into getting even with the famous love guru by inventing a digital marriage…to him. She’s engaged to her publisher, quite-a-catch Richard (Firth). Here’s a rude surprise for them when they try to secure a wedding license.
Dr. Emma, not suspecting a thing, has to track down and charm this pool-playing pubfly to sign and notarize a phonebook worth of papers annulling the “marriage” so that she can happily-ever-after with Quite a Catch Richard. Naturally, blue collar hunk Patrick isn’t going to sign anything until he’s made her suffer, and perhaps taught her a lesson.
With such an elaborate — if icky — “meet cute,” could “love” be in the offing, somewhere between the beer-and-shots meetup, the wedding cake tasting and her first exposure to his Indian friends?
What strikes me, catching up to “Husband” all these years later, is the level of commitment of the cast.
Start-up studios always spend too much money hiring stars nobody else is beating a door down to cast filming scripts most studios have already passed on. Jennifer Lopez is usually the first name they think of.
And Griffin Dunne’s unblemished record behind the camera — he went on to make “Movie 43” — points to a studio being run by people who had no idea what they were doing.
But Thurman throws herself at this New York-filmed extravaganza as if the state was coming to take her kids if it wasn’t a hit. She’s borderline manic, relentlessly upbeat in scene after scene, be it shooting pool and doing shots with Morgan’s Patrick or embodying romantic sophistication with Firth.
Seeing her give her all to the pratfalls and play drunk like “Pulp Fiction” was just a warm-up is a wonder to behold.
Morgan amps up the charm, as if guessing this might be his only shot at jumping from TV to mainstream movie success. He got three good shots, actually — “The Losers,” “Watchmen” and this. Thank heaven for “The Walking Dead,” right JDM?
Firth is Firth, Rossellini charms as the beaming, giggling wife of a German corporate raider (Dullea) about to take over Richard’s publishing house, and Shepard, of all people, manages an offhanded, lighthearted ease as Emma’s ever-tomcatting Dad, a guy who’s been judged by his daughter enough to relish her little predicament, but not too much.
“Don’t keep your husbands waiting.”
Movies like “Accidental Husband” remind me of why I rarely blame the players when a rom-com goes wrong. Thurman gives her all to fake chemistry with these two, and both co-stars give as good as they get, and it’s never quite enough to come off.
The script is crap, the direction lackluster, and an awful lot of cash is left on the table in this poker-game of a comedy. There were more laughs to be played for in the radio hostess side of things, more giggles in the WASP fireman’s connection to the Indian family that’s all but adopted him, more broad humor in the Richard-Emma connection and rift.
The script doesn’t find them and Dunne doesn’t go looking for them on his own.
It wasn’t in the cards for “The Accidental Husband” to be a hit. But in better hands, it might have managed “Respectable,” earnest, “adult” and “loving.” It lives on as an artifact of a big screen career that might have been, or might have been extended, a director who talks a better game than he directs and a distributing studio/vanity project that never was and never should have parted with the cash in the first place.
Rating: PG-13 (Some Sexual Content|Brief Strong Language)
Cast: Uma Thurman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Colin Firth, Sam Shepard, Isabella Rossellini and Keir Dullea.
Credits: Directed by Griffin Dunne, scripted by Mimi Hare, Clare Naylor, Bonnie Sikowitz. A Bob Yari release streaming pretty much everywhere.
Running time: 1:30
With teen characters named “God,” “Boston,” “Graham Cracker” and “Squishy” acting irrationally, hedonistically and out-of-control, you can’t help but feel “What nutty screenwriter cooked up this?”
But “Romeo and Juliet Killers” is based on a true story. Populate it with actors — who are by definition more gorgeous than we mere mortals — and you barely have to play up the sordid stuff to get a lurid, over-the-top thriller about an infamous crime “ripped from today’s headlines,” back when headlines were a thing.
Leigha Sinnott plays Tylar Witt, a suburban California teen totally unrestrained by her exasperated single mom (Kelly Sullivan). Screaming obscenities, lashing out and storming-out in whatever tartwear strikes her mercurial mood, Tylar is a master manipulator.
Mom JoAnne can’t even restrain her long enough to make her stay to finish their latest knock-down, drag-out. The cruel kid will scream allegations of abuse loud enough for the neighbors and cops to hear.
As neighbor Val (Alicia Ziegler) is an insurance fraud investigator married to a cop (Darren Dupree Washington), that could be a problem. But Val sees right through this hellion. Her “It’s tough love time” lectures fall on JoAnne’s deaf ears.
Tylar’s reign of errors includes imbibing whatever she can get her hands on and coming on to whoever strikes her fancy. This new guy in her circle, “Boston (Zachary Roozen)?” He’s a little older, edgy and handsome enough to spark her interest.
“Pretty sure he’s gay,” and “as a daffodil,” no less. But he’s a lot more open-minded about that sort of thing than “categorizations” suggest. Besides, with the right gifts from his “bag of goodies,” everybody’s sexual inhibitions vanish.
“Romeo and Juliet Killers” is a somewhat drawn-out account of their torrid affair, his way of charming himself into JoAnne’s life, Val’s growing alarm and the ever-more-fraught confrontations that point the characters towards the label the press gave them that became the movie’s title.
Actress-turned-director Lindsay Hartley tells the story in one broad, obvious stroke after another. This reinforces the feeling that everybody saw this coming save for the mother whose repeated “I’m not STUPID” confrontations suggest that yes, maybe she was.
The film’s third act plays like a long epilogue, as no one involved acts in a rational way once they’ve committed a heinous crime, or sense someone they know has.
There has already been a documentary about the Tylar Witt case and it’s almost certainly been covered by any number of podcasts. But if “true crime” is your thing and you’d like to see all the nudity and sex and insincere “I love yous” that court transcripts teased, have at it.
It ain’t Shakespeare. But “Romeo and Juliet Lovers” gets a dirty “true crime” job done, emphasizing the dirt every laborious step of the way.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Leigha Sinnott, Zachary Roozen, Kelly Sullivan, Alicia Ziegler and Darren Dupree Washington.
Credits: Directed by Lindsay Hartley, scripted by Peter Hunziker and Cynthia Riddle. A Tubi release.
Running time: 1:46
Movie Nation 