This Scottish period piece, about a budding concert promoter who books XTC and Iron Maiden and gets to say, “U-2? Never HAIRD’of’em,” is set in 1979 and into the early ’80s and looks gonzo and grungy and fun.
Whatever the audience for this sort of music nostalgia about that era in music, the people writing the checks for movies to get made in the UK seem to never tire of them.
“Schemers” is out March 30.
I’m not sure I got “corporate reincarnation conspiracy” out of this trailer, to be honest.
But that’s what “Chariot” is about. Check out Malkovich’s clown-red hair and understated sinister growl in this trailer for a film that also stars Thomas Mann, Rosa Salazar, Scout Taylor-Compton and Shane West.
“Chariot” opens April 15.
Passing by, “Huda’s Salon” looks like any other hair salon any place hair salons can be found.
Yes, it’s in the Middle East, so the all glass front has a coating of floral sun tinting decor. But inside, Huda banters with her clients. Gossip and griping about customers who “go to Youtube and copy haircuts — badly,” rather than coming in, joking and even dispensing marital advice comes with the rinse, trim and styling.
But the conversation trails off as Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) finishes the tea Huda offers her “special” clients. And when she dozes off, Huda springs into actions that will make your jaw drop.
“Huda’s Salon” is a West Bank story “inspired by true events,” a tale of a Bethlehem Palestinian hair dresser who drugs select customers, calls in a male collaborator, totes women like Reem into the back where they strip her and pose her nude in bed with the nude man Huda pays to carry out this scheme.
The Polaroid picture will tell a story that won’t just get the victim shamed. In a patriarchal Islamic culture, it could get her killed, if she doesn’t kill herself from fear and trauma about the experience.
Reem’s awakened “How COULD you?” earns a curt “We want you to work with us” from Huda (Manal Awad). Reem is being blackmailed by the Israeli Secret Police to work as an informant, forced to become “a traitor” — which could get her killed if she’s found out — by the threat of exposure for infidelity, which could also get her killed.
Palestinian-Dutch writer-director Hany Abu-Assad, who made the gripping and revealing drama about two guys on a suicide-bombing mission “Paradise Now,” tells this harrowing story from two points of view.
Reem — pretty, in her late 20s, hard-pressed for cash, with a baby girl and a boorish husband (Jalal Masarwa) who already suspects her of being unfaithful — hurries home in shock, trying to process this life-threatening betrayal. Will she call the contact number Huda gave her and start informing on her own people for money? Is there anyone she can tell, anyone who can help her scheme a way out of this dilemma?
And we see Huda, as the common usage puts it, “go through some things.” It turns out the Palestinian Authority’s own underground “secret police” have been watching her shop. They bust in, grab her, and next thing we know, she’s in a dark basement, being offered a cigarette and facing her own reckoning — an interrogation about what she’s been doing, who she does it for and why.
“Huda’s Salon” cuts back and forth between Huda’s fatalistic, “I’m prepared to die…I’ve been expecting it” questioning and Reem’s increasingly fraught scramble to find a way “out.” Huda’s story kind of backs up her fatalism. But as Reem has a baby, a husband she can’t talk to and extended family that might have one person who buys into her story, if she’s lucky, we fear for her and her baby. We’ve already heard of one victim who committed suicide.
“It’s easier to occupy a society that is already repressing itself,” Huda muses between puffs of her proffered cigarette. When you’ve got a secret police designed to intimidate your people to keep them in line, and carry out “extrajudicial killings” when they aren’t, when your religion oppresses women to such a degree that their lives are forfeit for merely being accused of transgressions, all their Israeli oppressors have to do is apply a little extra pressure and a few shekels to maintain their notion of “order.”
Abu-Assad keeps the puppet-masters unseen, with mere glimpses of Israeli helicopters and “the dividing line wall,” the sounds of jet flyovers and a single voice of the unsympathetic, transactional Israeli “contact” over the phone.
The filmmaker maintains suspense through the interplay between the two points of view. We see the consequences of treachery play out before Huda is grabbed, a gruesome death by gasoline and match. We know what Huda is up against, even as she matter-of-factly explains how she selected her targets.
“I chose women who are married to a—-les.”
I didn’t wholly buy Awad’s portrayal of the hairdresser/spy’s resigned bravado. We only get a hint that she can be shaken and scared, and the interrogator (Ali Suliman) tries the “good cop” thing entirely too much. Yes, Huda can be pitied, too. It’s not like she jumped into this treachery of her own accord. But impending grisly, painful death would rattle any character not played by Tom Cruise.
Elhadi’s Reem gives us shock and the mad mental math she runs through as she tries, almost entirely isolated and on her own, to figure out some escape plan in which she lives, or at least her child is cared for. Elhadi lets us see terror mixed with resignation. This is the corner the Israelis and Huda, and she (by marrying the wrong guy) and her culture have painted her into.
Abu-Assad’s dabbled in Hollywood (the Kate Winslet/Idris Elba thriller “The Mountain Between Us”). But his true calling is telling stories from Palestine, tales that explain the people and the place and the psychology of life under oppressive, racist long-term occupation.
“Huda’s Salon” is a film that reminds us that whatever we’re too distracted to notice about the Occupied Territories, whatever whitewashing or one-siding says about the problems there, the consequences of this festering injustice are not something the Israelis can just wall up or rinse away.
Cast: Manal Awad, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Ali Suliman and Jalal Masarwa
Credits: Scripted and directed by Hany Abu-Assad. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:31
“UFO” is a cheerfully cheesy, sometimes sappy and always formulaic teen romance from the “bad boys on bikes” school.
It’s a Turkish drama that immerses us in the two-wheeled stunts and scofflaws culture of an unnamed Turkish city (Adana), brings in a romance between a college-bound singer torn between the rich kid with the fancy bike and the punk with “UFO” painted on his, and folds in underground races, stolen bikes and bike parts, Turkish justice and ways to elude it.
And damned if it doesn’t toe the line just shy of “tolerable” before going completely to hell in the finale.
Ese (Mert Ramazan Demir) has just gotten out of the army and leaps right back into motorcycle daredevilry with his mate Gokhan ( Kerem Alp Kabul) — feet on the handlebars, driving on his belly, all captured for videos celebrating the feats of Kartal Motor, the struggling family bike shop.
Ipek Filiz Yazici plays Deniz, the fetching blonde burying her singing ambition to get into a good college in Istanbul and rescue her mother from an unhappy marriage.
Events conspire to throw them together. The roadblock the Kartal kids sets up for illegal motorcycle street stunting blocks the SUV Deniz is in with her dad. Then Ese and Gokhan crash a graduation party for rich-boy-with-a-pricey-bike Cenk (Mekin Sezer).
A showdown is set-up but barely followed-through on, “the girl” has to choose which guy to give the eye to, and somebody has to observe “It’s the rider, not the bike” (in English, or Turkish with subtitles).
Because those are the rules when you’re making a bike-racing romance.
Ese’s extended family and the friends who help with the shop make a most promising “Fast and Furious” milieu for director Onur Bilgetay‘s film. The grit and grime and too-familiar-with-the-justice-system vibe of the family, which includes the sisters, mothers and fiances of the menfolk who know just who to call the next time the lads get arrested, has a lived-in quality to the banter and relationships.
The bike-racing scene is too-thinly developed, but it has one great piece of slang that biker culture the world over should adapt. A UFO on a bike is an “unidentified forgotten object,” as in the guy you leave behind in the dust when you’re racing him.
The Ese-Deniz romance is all courtship montages, musical interludes and “He’s just a poor boy” and “She’s just a rich girl” strife.
But one early step in the making of a genre piece like this seems mostly skipped-over by our director and his screenwriter, Meryem Gültabak. You should familiarize yourself with other films in the genre just to see what works and what you can’t afford to leave out.
The leads have decent chemistry and one of the chases is pretty well-handled. But the bike-racing stuff is seriously third-rate, decades behind what Hollywood and Europe deliver. The motorcycles are similarly underwhelming, very Vietnamese Third World dirt bike.
Every time the picture loses track of the greasy chain and blown motors milieu of the shop, the racers, their priorities and seat-of-the-pants lives, it stops cold.
Not giving your movie visible, fleshed-out foes to battle — the cops waiting to “catch you in the act,” the bank that wants to repo the shop, the rich kid powerful enough to cause them problems, their racing opponents in the coming “big race” (which isn’t that “big” and SERIOUSLY lame) — makes it fall short long before that bizarre, dopey, “Dead Man’s Curve” finale.
Which is where “UFO,” as I said, goes completely to hell.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Ipek Filiz Yazici, Mert Ramazan Demir, Kerem Alp Kabul
Credits: Directed by Onur Bilgetay, scripted by Meryem Gültabak. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:50
A signature chase in “The Batman” involves the new Caped Crusader and his new hooniganed Batmobile — a Camaro/Mustang mashup — chasing Oswald Cobblepot through the anarchic, gloomy and rain-soaked streets of Gotham City.
As you would expect, that chase does not go well for “Ozzie,” aka “The Penguin.” And one cannot help but note the crashed vehicle the feckless, cagey criminal in peeled out of after attempting his getaway. It’s a Maserati.
The one thing that truly separates the Batman/Dark Knight movies from every other comic book adapted for the big screen is that we always get a Batman of our moment. Actors change and cars evolve and the tone and the nature of the villains shifts more dramatically still, always to suit “the moment.”
And there are no coincidences in movies like this, which are production-designed to death. Today’s villain drives a Maserati, on and off the screen.
The Robert Pattinson Batman era comes in a time of trauma, treachery and treason, with the very Republic at stake. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” a couple of Planets taken over by Apes) sets us up for a tale of vengeance in a time of great wrongdoing, with leaders murdered and criminals as big as rogue state rulers.
It’s too long, and maybe there’s a little too much concern about the way Pattinson’s hair flops over one eye. But from first frame to last, Reeves matches the master, Christopher Nolan in two important regards. As in the last Nolan “Dark Knight,” this Batman is embattled and almost overwhelmed by a city and its institutions coming apart at the seams.
And like Nolan’s “Knights,” this beast of a movie looks, sounds and plays as epic.
In that signature first act chase, it’s not just the howling, drifting Batmobile bearing down on an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell as The Penguin. Michael Giacchino’s thunderous score makes us feel it is justice itself — vengeance — closing the gap to take out this version of a “Teflon Don.”
Pattinson — armored in a Batsuit meant to bulk him up and make the character’s many unsurvivable blasts, plunges and bullet blows seem survivable — grows into the persona this Bruce Wayne is projecting, a callow young man fighting crime, his past and the demons he carries, known and unknown. He’s good in the part.
In cowl and combat boots, BatPatts looms over Jeffrey Wright‘s returning (future) commissioner James Gordon, whose role has been beefed up to take the “carry the picture” burden off the “Twilight” hearthrob. And in casting the willowy and petite Zoë Kravitz, Reeves and Warner Brothers give us the tiniest Catwoman ever, shorter even than the feline Eartha Kitt. Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne in a Batsuit towers over her, even as the guy behind the mask is intimidated by the tiny tyro pursuing her own agenda.
Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig set this just-after-origin story in a time of rampant corruption — dirty cops and phony “law and order” politicians — and crime, with one unseen criminal murdering “hypocrites” in public life in a very public way, leaving the few uncorrupted cops and The Batman ciphers and riddles to figure out.
This Riddler isn’t cute and funny. He’s The Joker’s Just-as-Evil-Twin. But finding him is going to take teasing out his riddle/clues and tricking or entrapping the city’s crime boss (John Turturro, playing an unexcitable monster who’s comfortable in his own skin), this Penguin fellow (Colin Farrell), Catwoman and a DA (Peter Sarsgaard) whose motives seem as sketchy as a certain real-life “Gotham” DA.
Ok, maybe THAT’s actually a coincidence.
Pattinson gives us a Batman laboring under too much voice-over narration, but oh-so-right in one all-important regard. He’s fighting crime, dealing with nightly summons from the already-established Batsignal. He’s troubled, grasping for clarity and dealing with the police from a position of mutual distrust. They’re corrupt, he’s a “freak” overstepping his authority, thanks to his new friend and protector, Gordon.
With his trusty manservant Alfred (Andy Serkis) bearing the scars of an ex “Circus” (British intelligence) spy whose bodyguard work kept the kid alive, this Bruce Wayne started this “crusade” thing young, as an almost masochistic duty. He never questions that impulse, just doggedly goes about his business as the bodies pile up.
“Maybe it’s beyond saving, but we have to try.”
Kravitz makes a fine Catwoman, although the physics of somebody 5’2″ and model-thin kicking ass seems more a stretch than usual. Serkis has too little to do and our Riddler’s revelation is anti-climactic, despite the accomplished actor playing him.
Farrell’s transformation is Jared Leto “Gucci” level, so extreme as to make one wonder why he and they went this far.
Turturro and Wright are so good that Pattinson holding his own with them tells you all you need to know about him in the role. All those years of indie thrillers and quirky dramas after “Twilight” paid off. It’s not just about the eyebrows and hair any more.
The lack of supernatural aliens and alien gods has always made this comic book universe a favorite of mine, and I’m hard pressed to mention any “Batman,” even the Joel Schumacher ones, that didn’t connect to its era and try to say something about our times and the state of the nation in some way.
“The Batman” isn’t light, with just a couple of lines landing laughs, one of them detailing the orphaned son of murdered parents’ “No guns” ethos, which Gordon isn’t having.
“Yeah man, that’s your thing.”
Reeves, who did a good job of making the “Apes” movies topical enough to chew on, positions his comic book movie not just as a worthy successor to Nolan’s trilogy, but as a gritty, real-stunts/real-gravitas counterpoint to the digital effects heavy Marvel films and DC’s own “Wonder Woman/Justice League/Aquaman” efforts.
Yeah, it’s too damned long. But cleaning up this big a mess, Reeves and Craig tell us, is going to take a lot of time, and even then, there’s no guarantee evil won’t triumph. The hero our times call for is somebody undaunted by the task, undeterred by the odds, unswayed by negative press. And like the best among us, he’s still wearing a mask.
Rating: PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Paul Dano, Alex Ferns and Peter Sarsgaard.
Credits: Directed by Matt Reeves, scripted by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig, based on the Bob Kane comic book. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:55
Ladies and gentlemen, your American tax dollars at work! And you were afraid every GOP tax cut for the rich was just wasted.
Frank DePew, a 60something motorsports enthusiast who made his money off the heavily-subsidized solar farm (for utilities, not sustainable, tree-friendly home and business rooftops) industry, took his trickle-down cash and bought himself an IMSA racing team, aligning himself with two championship-level drivers — Robin Liddell and Andrew Davis.
DePew would share driving duties in the 10 event endurance race season that includes stops for the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring and races at Road Wisconsin and elsewhere. He purchased Rebel Rock Racing, lock stock and uncarbureted, figuring to buy himself glory in a prestigious series well above the club racing where he’d spent his spare time previously.
Oh, and he’d commission a documentary about his “Rookie Season,” with director Adrian Bonvento getting footage and sound inside the cars, on the (often rainy) track, in the pits and with the crew chief in the viewing box.
“Rookie Season” is the quintessential “vanity project,” with decent enough race footage and banal nothings delivered in voice-over by the drivers, with the Scottish champ Liddell taking care to be diplomatic about how he characterizes the rich poseur who wrecks the car in early races as DePew devotes himself to conquering a steep learning curve.
The makings of a comedy are in those early race scenes, with DePew clumsily crashing, “owning” his blame and spinning it with an “ADHD” self-diagnosis, the excuse that replaced “a little dyslexic” among the rich and famous.
Because we all need to take credit for what we’ve “conquered.” Thanks, Oprah.
Sorry if I’m being too subtle here, but I’ve been to several events in this racing series at Sebring and the VIR over the years. And there’s always a new version of this sort of “gashole” competing, many of them celebrities. Some of them even have the gall to document their bought-and-paid-for glory with a film crew.
Here, even the repetitive “put on the slicks (or swap out to “rain” tires)” material that dominates the racing sequences is more interesting than this lot and the fellow who bought his way into something of dubious merit just to feed his ego.
Rating: Unrated, some profanity
Cast: Robin Liddell, Frank DePew, Andrew Davis
Credits: Directed by Adrian Bonvento. An Adventure Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:15
Zellweger and Judy Greer and Josh Duhamel in a DuFro star in this darkly comic NBC miniseries based on a true crime podcast.
March 8. This looks promising enough to actually make me watch something on (shudder) network broadcast TV.
It’s a stereotype, of course — this idea promoted by decades of plays, movies and TV shows that every gay man is acting out his own “Torch Song Trilogy,” suffering (rarely) in silence or with the grand dramatic gestures of a tragic diva — Judy or Callas or Carmen playing out her final scene, dying for love or want of it.
But Jérémie Meyer can’t help it. He’s an actor, after all. “Narcissistic” comes with the job. And he’s going through things, the first of which is losing the role of a lifetime with a writer-producer unloading all HIS problems on a stricken Jérémie in an amusing but oh-so-deflating “It’s not you, it’s ME” break-up/firing the moment we meet him.
Jérémie, whose dad “just died,” is very slow to figure out that his own life of disappointment, professional and personal struggle that includes love life issues, is “My Best Part.”
Director, co-writer and star Nicolas Maury (“Dear Prudence,” “Paris, je t’aime”) serves up a dry comedy that invites us to watch Jérémie suffer and laugh at him as he haplessly copes with everything confronting him over the course of this lightly-amusing film (titled “Garçon chiffon” in French).
That “break-up” firing scene is just the start of it. We join him as he ducks into his first meeting of AJA, a “Jealousy Anonymous” support group whose members count the days since they first figured out (in French with English subtitles) “the world doesn’t revolve around me.”
A fellow member advises Jérémie to not “open every closet. You don’t know what’s in there.” That is advice Jeremy ignores. He’s given to storming in on his hunky veterinary surgeon lover (Arnaud Valois) and accusing him of treating his intern as a side piece. The couple’s brittle back and forth makes one wonder what Albert could possibly see in this clingy, self-absorbed drama queen. Jérémie even goes so far as to purchase spy camera gear for their apartment to check up on him.
Jérémie unloads his “What’s wrong with me?” insecurities on his agent (Laurent Capelluto), commiserates with his close friend, the volatile actress Sylvie (Laure Calamy), whose heated argument with her husband morphs into an over-the-top rehearsal moment with her giving bad-luck- Jérémie a black eye.
It’s only through a long visit to his mother (Nathalie Baye) that we get a handle on what’s really bothering the actor, whom mom has given assorted cute nicknames (“Napkin”) and who refers to him as “autistic,” when really he’s just another seriously self-absorbed actor/drama queen going through a rough patch.
Maury, sporting a dark metallic-rust bowl cut and a hangdog Will Forte pout, flirts with letting us pity Jérémie — but only flirts. He’s processing grief about his father, his career, his love life, and we’re pretty sure he’s put those in the most selfish order in his mind.
“Sometimes I feel like an apple on compost, waiting to bio-degrade.”
But flashbacks to his bullied childhood, when all he wanted to do was be alone, dress as a gamine and lip-sync to French girl pop, and third act revelations about his father’s death soften the character just enough for us to identify with him.
“My Best Part” is a bit of a stroll as a movie, never hurrying through anything, never forcing a laugh, taking long pauses and wandering off on tangents such as Jérémie’s ineffectual lust for his mother’s young helper (Théo Christine).
My favorite part is when we get a glimpse of what might be his “cure” for thinking “the world revolves around me.” He’s given a dog. Nothing takes you out of your self-concern quicker than caring for a dependent, affectionate pet who turns your “needy” into his “needy” in a flash.
And as Maury probably figured out when he first screened the film, nobody pays any attention to the whiny bowl-cut actor when he’s sharing scenes with the most adorable husky ever.
Rating: unrated, nudity, discussions of suicide. profanity
Cast: Nicolas Maury, Nathalie Bay, Arnaud Valois, Laure Calamy and Théo Christine
Credits: Directed by Nicolas Maury, scripted by Maud Ameline, Sophie Fillières and Nicolas Maury. An Altered Innocence.
Running time: 1:48
Film Movement+ is streaming a retrospective of the deadpan Dutch satirist Alex van Warmerdam beginning in March. So if you were intrigued by any film of his you might have stumbled into in North America — 2013’s “Borgman” was the most famous — here’s a chance to dip into a world of this award winning, film festival favorite.
Film Movement is offering six films surveying his career, and while I’ll get to others, I’m going to come right out and say that maybe the cryptic and drier-than-dry “The Northerners (De noorderlingen) ” shouldn’t be your entre into the mind of this ironist.
Set in a an unfinished/never-will-be-finished Dutch planned community in the early ’60s, it plays up the clash of provincialism with modernity as we grimly grin at lives of not-so-quiet desperation.
They have lovely new flats, a shiny new school and an antiseptic tree farm (planned) forest. But small town nosiness, gossip, sexual frustrations, religious superstition and values have followed them there. Nobody can meet his or her own needs. Nobody is happy.
Jacob (Jack Wouterse) is the randy, pot-bellied butcher, a man whose never-ending “needs” aren’t being met by his Catholic wife Martha (Annet Malherbe). He is jumping her, she is fending him off and looking to her “living” statue of St. Francis for relief.
Their son (Leonard Lucieer) finds escape in dressing up in his vision of what his hero, Congolese founding father and future martyr Patrice Lumumba. A little Dutch boy riding around in leopard-spotted cape, cap and blackface is quite the hoot, right?
Forest ranger Jager (Rudolf Lucieer) is keeping the secret that he’s sterile, which has frustrates his frisky wife Elisabeth (Loes Wouterson) no end. He takes out his frustrations on anyone intruding in “my forest” which he oversees, with a bolt-action rifle, according to “my rules.”
But as we glimpse these lives lived on one unpaved street, with flats and shops and forest and school all in a neat, Dutch row, we figure out that the reason we know all this is the postman Plagge (van Warmerdam himself), a busybody who delivers mail on his own schedule. That’s because he keeps a tea kettle hidden in a pond in the forest. Every day, he stops, lights a fire, boils water and steams open everybody’s letters. The bills? He uses them to light the fires.
That’s pretty much an open secret, but the sniveling smart-ass greets every accusation with mock outrage.
“Imagine, a postman going through everybody’s mail!” (in Dutch, with English subtitles). The very idea!
The most serious shortcoming of “The Northerners” is how little van Warmerdam does with these characters. The situations — Jager chasing and hoping to catch Plagge in the act of lighting his inquisitive little fires, pointing his rifle at everybody, Jakob’s boorish efforts to get around his wife’s sexual reluctance with more willing partners, the women of the town visiting Martha as if she’s the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary — quickly become repetitive.
Jager’s seething rage, Jakob’s simmering fury, Martha’s hunger strike, the postman’s one-step-too-far reckoning, Elisabeth’s unrequited affection, a sexual initiation, the buzzard sitting on the edge of a marital bed, none of it takes us anywhere we want or need to go.
The unending irony and myopia mean the entire film has pretty much the same pitch, beginning to end. No incident or situation raises or lowers that pitch, no emotion arises from tragedy, no realization that everybody might learn everybody else’s secret and new character (an actual African or “escaped Negro” showing up) or crime changes anything.
The odd cute moment is rare enough to seem out of place. Whatever van Warmerdam is winking at, nothing much here passes for entertainment, enlightenment or edification. And “unpleasant” at every turn is hardly a substitute for anything this heartless film seems to lack.
Rating: unrated: violence, sexual situations
Cast: Jack Wouterse, Annet Malherbe, Loes Wouterson, Rudolf Lucieer, Leonard Lucieer and Alex Van Warmerdam.
Credits: Directed by Alex van Warmerdam, scripted by Ale van Warmerdam and Aat Ceelen. A Film Movement+ release.
Running time: 1:45
The French film about Charlotte Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin, comes out March 18.
Movie Nation 