Perhaps you’ve missed the phenomenon that is British comedienne Catherine Tate, and the most outrageous character from Brit TV’s “The Catherine Tate Show.”
Well, she’s got her own movie, and after the Brits have a go at it, you might want to stream it.
Sure, it looks like “Mama’s Family” with a British edge and a modern “Lissen up, Millennials” pop about it.
But hey, could be fun.
He missed a train home after visiting his family in Glasgow on the anniversary of his mother’s death.
But as grumps and ducks into the tiny club called King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut instead, we get the tiniest glimpse of the night’s musical bill. Scrawled at the bottom of the chalkboard is an afterthought, perhaps even chalked on by the “cheeky” unknown band themselves — “Oasis.” That fateful night, our narrator assures us, “changed history.”
“Creation Stories” is a drugs, not-really-sex and Jesus and Mary Chain/Oasis history seen through the eyes of and heard through the c-word-cluttered Glaswegian accent of Ewen Bremner as record impresario and “stupid ginger gargoyle” Alan McGee.
Every movie about any British musical phenomenon of the post-Beatles era is, in its way, an inferior copy of “24 Hour Party People.” “Creation Stories” even covers some of that same ground, with our hero (Leo Flanagan plays him as a teen) remembering the night he and his Bowie/Thin Lizzy-obsessed mates saw The Sex Pistols on British TV and decided that was who they wanted to be,
But this muddy, murky dramedy — starring a “Trainspotting” alumnus, giving us the barest glimpses of this or that Red Letter Date Brit Musical Moment and burdened with occasionally indecipherable accents — is a winner.
“Creation Stories” takes its title from McGee’s memoir, which was named for the groundbreaking record label he founded and ran in the ’80s and ’90s It’s a scrambling “seat of the pants” movie that, like McGee, demands that you meet it on his own terms.
The framing device is a long LA interview the drugs-and-ego-tripping McGee gives to an LA reporter (Suki Waterhouse) in the ’90s, a common vehicle for telling tales of a famous person’s life, real or fictional.
McGee grew up in a house with a brutish dad (Richard Jobson) determined to beat the “wearing your sister’s make-up” out of a son he’s decided will become “a qualified electrician,” like him.
Alan McGee had bigger dreams. We follow him to London and see his first steps into the music scene playing with bands like The Drains and The Laughing Apple.
“I didn’t have any talent, which limited my options some.”
But he did have an ear, and with a team he describes as “accidental alchemists,” they started a club, then record labels, and signing bands like Television Personalities, My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and finally Oasis made their names, allowing this always-broke loan-shark-financed label to leave its mark.
A running gag — every band McGee hypes, from his earliest days to Oasis, is “going to be BIGGER than U-2!”
This Nick Moran film skips through a lot of those “creation stories,” save for the Oasis one. Magazine covers and even that tonight’s-musical-line-up chalkboard with Oasis on it are on the screen for what seems like split seconds. Only the Oasis rise is give much musical screen time.
What “Creation” does instead is follow McGee down the familiar rabbit hole of drugs (Jason Isaac plays the one dealer-too-many who broke McGee — almost) and into political influence, his role in helping the Labour Party and Tony Blair relabel itself and Britain “Cool Britannia” in the ’90s, and McGee’s enraged cynicism about that.
Unlike most films of this genre, the man is more important than his “movement,” and that’s the focus here. And hey, if your biggest impact was giving the world Oasis, you see the point.
Not all of it works. But giddy moments and goofy touches — former Bond villain Steven Berkoff shows up as “my inspiration,” the ghost of infamous 1930s novelist, occultist, thinker and druggy Alastair Crowley — put “Creation Stories” over.
And Bremner, even when we can’t understand every word coming out of that haggis and whisky-sotted gob, wholly inhabits this self-destructive yet idealistic tyro who so shaped his era that he himself almost became “bigger than U-2.”
Rating: unrated, drugs, profanity galore, a hint of sex
Cast: Ewen Bremner, Suki Waterhouse, Leo Flanagan, Jason Isaac, Seána Kerslake with Steven Berkhoff as Alastair Crowley.
Credits: Directed by Nick Moran, scripted by Dean Cavanagh and Irvine Welsh, based on Alan McGee’s memoir of the same title. An RLJE release.
Running time: 1:45
The fractious family dealing with the death of a matriarch or patriarch comedy — or drama — dates from the Greeks. So finding some new way of coming at it has proven a challenge over the decades.
But COVID provided one that director and co-writer Stephanie Laing and a vast crew of “names” overcame with “Family Squares.” It’s a cute and quirky COVID comedy built on Zoom calls, big secrets, sibling estrangement and amusingly “judgy” banter.
Anyone predisposed to like the off-center line-readings of Judy Greer, the curmudgeonly cracks of June Squibb, Earth Mama weariness of Margot Martindale, the blunt “honesty” of Anne Dowd and the late career realization Henry Winkler is still pretty damn funny — just to name the elder stateswomen and men of the cast — should get a kick from this.
Squibb plays the no-nonsense Mama Mabel who begat a daughter (Martindale) who had five children, leading to a couple of great-grandchildren as well. Mabel also gave birth to a feckless, self-absorbed and oh-so-Californian touchy-feely son (Winkler).
Greer, Billy Magnussen, Casey Wilson, Timothy Simons and Scott MacArthur play the grandchildren, each dealing with some sort of crisis, each overly dependent on “Granny” in ways that will become obvious. Elsie Fisher and MacLaren Laing play the great grandchildren, one dealing with an earlier loss that has her lashing out at her stumbling, needy dad (Simons), the other stuck on a road trip with his shattered, even-needier mom (Greer) who is RVing her way through Arizona to escape a divorce and pandemic.
The estimable Sam Richardson plays the funeral director.
“Shall we get down to the business of bereavement?” “Can I just STOP you right there?”
And Zoe Chao is the hospice nurse who presides over everybody who dials in to see Mabel Worth draw her last breaths.
Zoom? “It’s like watching the f—–g ‘Jetsons'” may be the pithiest summary of that experience ever.
Uncle Bobby (Winkler), who gets on everybody’s nerves, is quick to speak up and quicker to jump the gun on Mabel’s status.
“It’s her death rattle, it’s her soul trying to say ‘Goodbye.'”
Mabel does eventually pass, but she left behind videos giving hard-nosed advice about stumbling members of the family (most of them) and revealing wrongdoing of others, and reminding one and all “You’ve all been acting like jackasses” for the past year. The dings are quick to come and cut to the core. Noting a posh Zoom backdrop in a sibling’s kitchen — “How much did GRANDMA spend on that remodel?”
“I just want you to focus on your family and focus on you. You’ve never had a problem doing that in the past.”
The self-published author (Scott MacArthur), perhaps a war hero, at least in his mind — “I should write the obit. Have you had a chance to read my book?”
The funeral director doubles as an estate lawyer. Wait, what? “I AM in the Penny Saver now,” he chirps, angling for more business.
There’s also Mabel’s younger wife (Anne Dowd) back in New York, struggling to deal with how she’s been left out of much of this planning.
Sibling rivalry breaks down into “Look, we GET it, you’re BOTH the saddest.”
And every so often, the unseen narrator (Rob Reiner, sounding like he was recorded on a cellphone during a Zoom call) quotes George Burns and tries to move things along.
In terms of production values, “Family Squares” falls somewhere between the slick, purpose-made studio-backed romances “(Locked Down”) and the sea of more DIY affairs made by filmmakers hoping to be the first to initiate the “Lockdown” genre and use the limitations of a lockdown to his or her advantage.
The cast, as you’d expect, is superb, with every single player, many of them longtime audience favorites, delivering. The women are singularly impressive, so much so that even Chao brings such a zing to the hospice nurse that you forget she’s barely in it.
No, this isn’t deep. But there are some surprises and just enough laughs. If you’ve ever dealt with family over the death of a relative, the sting of recognition alone is worth an extra giggle or two.
Rating: R for language (profanity).
Cast: June Squibb, Judy Greer, Henry Winkler, Margot Martindale, Zoe Chao, Sam Richardson, Billy Magnussen, Casey Wilson, Timothy Simons, Scott MacArthur, Elsie Fisher, MacLaren Laing and Anne Dowd, narrated by Rob Reiner.
Credits: Directed by Stephanie Laing, scripted by Stephanie Laing and Brad Morris. A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:30
Neal McDonagh, Christina Ochoa, Tommy Flanagan and Jason Scott Lee star in this little people against the mob thriller, opening April 1.
Darby isn’t big on thinking things through. Rash decisions, lashing out, acting on impulse, that’s how you end up in your seventh stint of rehab, too jaded to mask your cynicism about the process.
A phone call telling her that Mom’s in the hospital with an aneurysm and that she “may not make it” prompts another impulse. Steal a couple of tools that’ll help you steal a car, and take off for Salt Lake.
But the weather’s closing the highways. And holing up in an Interstate rest area during a blizzard, she hears the cries from a van in the parking lot. A kid’s been kidnapped. Somebody among the four folks waiting out the weather inside is a child trafficker.
With no cell service and little history of rational decisions under pressure, what will Darby do?
“No Exit” is a claustrophobic, minimalistic and sometimes paranoid thriller, just five people trapped together, with at least two of them knowing a secret and one trying to figure out a way to save a little girl.
It’s probably not paranoid enough. But as the story gives away this or that secret too early, it compensates with new wrinkles, feeds the viewer, the heroine and the kidnapper clues about what’s to come and what will be used to make that happen.
Havana Rose Liu, just seen in “The Sky is Everywhere” and Netflix’s “The Chair,” impresses as our lead, a young woman who gave up and keeps giving up, until that phone call gives her purpose, and that child in the van delivers moral clarity. Darby’s problem solving might seem a stretch, but Liu makes her wariness and ability to lie/improvise on the fly feel lived in.
Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl and Dennis Haysbert are her fellow shut-ins, and suspects. The script and the casting throws doubt into the mix and encourages us to overthink things. Wait, did they cast him/her to throw us off the scent?
The dark and snowy outdoors are more convincingly snowy than frigid, and a rest area undergoing renovations gives the tale for too many options for mischief, plotting off to one side, and weapons.
Director Damien Power (“Killing Ground”) and the screenwriters, working from a Taylor Adams novel, trip us up just enough to keep this interesting and serve up plenty of violence — some of it torturous — to show us the high stakes.
Dickey and Haysbert are the stand-outs in the cast, playing a married couple with their own way of bickering.
“I don’t LIKE that guy.” “You don’t KNOW that guy.” “I’ve known PLENTY of ‘THAT guy.'”
As child kidnapping/trafficking thrillers go — and yes, there have been scores of these — “No Exit” barely stands out from the pack and overreaches at times. But it puts us in somebody’s snow-caked shoes and dares us to reason or fight our way out of this with her, which is all you can ask.
Rating: R for strong violence, language and some drug content
Cast: Havana Rose Liu, Dale Dickey, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl and Dennis Haysbert
Credits: Directed by Damien Power, scripted by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on the Taylor Adams novel. A 20th Century release on Hulu.
Running time: 1:35
A loud round of applause for Netflix for giving that master of dark French whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet, creator of “Delicatessen,” “Amelie” and “The City of Lost Children” money to make one of his twisted tales in his inimitable eye-candy style.
But it’s a crying shame “BigBug,” the Netflix film that resulted, is as plastic as Saran Wrap, as warm as Saran Wrap and as amusing as a puppy wrapped in Saran Wrap.
His big idea for the streaming service as another “trapped in one building” story (“Delicatessen”) in which future humans, absurdly reliant on AI, are locked in their houses as the AI “Singularity” is achieved and “Terminator: Judgement Day” begins.
Jeunet & Co. (co-writer Guillaume Laurant) try to wring pathos, thrills and laughs out of ridiculous people trying to outsmart machines, with the added bonus that their household “mecas” (mechanical), robots, are sympathetic to their humans and want to BE human, and so help out as best they can.
The “Jetsons” eye candy ‘bots, fashions, household gadgets and whatnot are impressive enough that the filmmaker pauses to take in brainy bot “Einstein” or Monique (Claude Perron), the maid robot who customizes herself to please her human owners in ways that include sexual ones.
That’s what’s going on with the household ‘bots. They’re coddling and ingratiating themselves with the humans trapped inside when “The Big Jam” (a massive self-driving car traffic jam) turns out to be the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Can these “family” robots prove their humanity and help save the actual humans?
The cyborg enforcer/security robots from high tech Yonyx all look like Francois Levantal dressed up as a RoboCop member of the Borg. These cyborgs are hosting popular reality TV shows and running for president. And they’re scary as all get out, equipped with lasers and new rules and laws that they themselves created to facilitate their take-over.
But why should they fret over humans fighting back? None of them can get out of their “Smart” houses.
The jokes are lame, either in English or French with English subtitles. Jeunet is better known for twisted sight gags, and there’s just one of those that really paid off for me — a hypnotized ditz (Claire Chust) is ordered to do something, convinced she has boundless strength, by a cyborg. She proceeds to drag all the other divorced parents, their hooking-up teen kids and a neighbor all the way across the living room to do the evil Yonyx Corp’s bidding.
Those French and their pantomime.
The people playing machines (Perron, Levantal and Alban Lenoir) stand out in the cast, but not for doing anything new with the “I’m stiff and jerking around because I’m a robot, get it?” bit. They stand out mainly because the humans playing humans are mostly dull, even the ditz.
Jeunet can’t even find much that’s funny about a cloned eternally obnoxious Jack Russell terrier, “the neighbor’s dog,” after introducing him.
After “Micmacs” (2009) I pretty much gave up on Jeunet, who had quite a run from the post-apocalyptic farce “Delicatessen” through “Lost Children,” “Alien Resurrection” (an inventive if not brilliant sequel), “Amelie” and “A Very Long Engagement.” So had film producers and financiers, judging from his slim filmography since then.
But I still applaud Netflix for giving him one last shot. Even though he blew it, “BigBug” still looks like nothing else that’s hit the screen in years. It’s just that he used to tell more touching and more whimsically interesting stories with those quirky settings.
Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity
Cast: Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Claude Perron, Stéphane De Groodt, Youssef Hajdi, François Levantal, Claire Chust, Marysole Fertard, Alban Lenoir, Hélie Thonnat and Dominique Pinon.
Credits: Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, scripted by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:51
The people that brought us “The Wave” and “The Quake” annex another piece of disaster movie real-estate with “The Burning Sea,” a compact, tense and smart oil rig yarn that’s light on melodrama, heavy on facts and heartening in its environmental messaging.
It’s “Deep Water Horizon” without clear-cut villains or swaggering, one-liner-popping heroes. Yes, some of the genre tropes the Scandinavians choose to leave out are missed. But there are things this trilogy of “when things go wrong in a big way” thrillers do that Hollywood might be well-served in copying.
For starters, the Big One, when it comes, won’t likely arrive from space as asteroids or aliens. It could be Earth-bound and natural, with a heavy dose of the Arrogance of Man involved.
“Burning Sea” follows the team that operates a fancy new underwater drone on behalf of the Norwegian oil industry. Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is young and seriously smitten, but not with the tech support specialist Arthur (Rolf Kristian Larsen) who keeps Eelie, the articulated, motor-driven eel that she drives that is able to wend its way through undersea oil-rig architecture to spot problems and make or identify fixes. Sofia is in love with single-dad Stian (Henrik Bjelland), a worker on one of the scores of rigs that fuel Norway’s economy by drilling for and pumping oil out from under the North Sea.
One day, Sofia and Arthur are called on an “emergency mission” that the big boss (Bjørn Floberg) won’t disclose to them the particulars of until they’ve signed their Non-Disclosure-Agreements (NDAs).
Uh oh.
Sure enough, a rig collapsed and sank. Everybody in a suit is worried about “security” and no one seems that excited when Eelie tracks down and finds a survivor. They have just enough time to take in that video when Sofia sees something far more disturbing. Telling her boss, the aptly-named William Lie (Floberg) gets her nowhere…she thinks.
“Why don’t we leave that to the specialists,” he purrs (in Norwegian with English subtitles).
But before you can say “COVER UP,” we’re treated to a meeting with “specialists” and the government official (Christoffer Staib) in charge of this corner of the economy. Nothing is released to the press, but nothing is covered-up or sugar coated inside that meeting. They’re looking at a calamity, perhaps “something we did ourselves (man-made)” that could skill scores of people and spill “350 times” what the Deepwater Horizon disaster dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
One can’t help but find refreshing the idea that nobody ducks the awful choices this dilemma presents to every decision maker. Steps are taken, but as is the way of such movies, things don’t go according to plan. I’ll let you guess who needs rescuing and who does that rescuing.
The “Quake” director and “Wave” screenwriter (one of them) strip the movie of a lot of conflicts that a Hollywood story would have jammed-in and any movie that wants to realistically appear “American” in this day and age would have to include.
There are no greedy corporate villains. Culpability is cultural, spread over the entire country that has gotten rich in this environmentally-catastrophic business.
There is no corporate or corporate media pushback, no politicians praising oil and rooting for the sea to catch fire, no Tucker Carlson begging for an apocalypse that he can blame on somebody his overlords want to make the scapegoat.
The Norwegians here are presented in a sort of idealized consensus-building aimed at “the greater good,” the sort of image polishing one usually associates with movies made by and about China.
“The Burning Sea” lacks the pulse-pounding ticking clock to doom of an impending earthquake or a tsunamic bearing down on our heroes, vital in “The Wave” and “The Quake.” Such an element is introduced, but the editing fritters away that edge-of-your-seat excitement, no matter how much the musical score insists it’s coming.
But those shortcomings are papered-over with a few scenes of genuine suspense and performances that go all-in on portraying these folks as slack-jawed at the scale of what they’re dealing with, but professionals ever intent on “working the problem.” Bosses soberly pass on awful news to those impacted by it, and people caught up in the maelstrom may look wild-eyed with fear, and seem manic, but they never panic.
And any time you can top your tale of crisis, calamity and heroism with sacrifice, pathos and a hopeful message, you call that a “win,” in Hollywood or Aelsund.
Rating: PG-13 for peril, some disturbing images, language and brief partial nudity
Cast: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Henrik Bjelland, Rolf Kristian Larsen and Bjørn Floberg
Credits: Directed by John Andreas Andersen, scripted by Harald Rosenløw-Eeg and Lars Gudmestad. A Magnolia/Magnet release.
Running time: 1:44
We know the minute we see the old man strike up a conversation with the young woman that she’s a ghost. Serene, silent and spectral, it doesn’t matter that he chats as if they’re old acquaintances. Something about him (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) and her (Noutnapha Soydara) suggests that they’ve met this way, on this long dirt road in rural Laos, many times.
The latest feature from Mattie Do, the LA daughter of Laotian refugees who moved back to Laos to become the country’s “only female filmmaker,” is a quiet and ominous story set in the future, but scripted and acted like an ancient folk tale. “The Long Walk” isn’t exactly a thriller, more of a mystery. And it’s science fiction with the barest traces of that genre in its slow-moving narrative.
But whatever you call this unicorn filmed by a unicorn, it’s engrossing and arresting.
We wonder about the old man from the start. He gathers scrap to sell in his village market, gets paid via an electronic implant in his arm, and seems to always be walking, with or without that lonely young woman who knows him but never speaks.
We’ve seen skulls half-buried in the dirt, and women suffering grievous injuries. There’s someone missing from that market. And as he always seems to be around these activities, we size him up as a serial killer or a shaman, because when the cops interrogate him and poke around his house, it’s as if they suspect him and also want him to contact the missing and presumedly dead woman.
A boy (Por Silatsa) lives along that same road, the son of an ill-tempered , hard-drinking father and sickly mother. The kid sees the young woman, too. And when the old man and the boy meet, what the child is told about her and himself is troubling, mind-blowing and illuminating for this tale of the unsettled dead and the superstitious, confused living.
They’re not the only ones. The Christopher Larsen (“Creepshow”) and Douangmany Soliphanh script is cryptic, giving up in secrets in tiny, belated servings. Director Do (Larsen wrote “Dearest Sister” for her, and they co-wrote “Creepshow”) patiently doles out clues and fixates on tone and the novelty of the setting.
It may be the future, but Laotian burial practices and rituals are treated as eternal. Characters like the old man leave oranges at roadside shrines, which the ghost eats and shares with the boy. There’s modernity, and a shamanistic “commune with the dead” tradition in addition to the mystery of who these women were or are and who is making them vanish, leaving their families grasping for closure.
Deaths we witness aren’t happening in real time, but in the past, the future or some Mobius loop containing both.
The patient storytelling won’t be to every taste, and truth be told, not a whole lot happens over the course of these 111 minutes. This isn’t jolting horror, and nothing about it could be pitched as “scary.”
But Do isn’t just an “only Laotian” novelty act. She’s not making commercial films (this 2019 festival film is just now earning distribution), and while there’s always a place at film festivals for movies from an exotic, little-filmed locale set in an exotic culture, one has to hope she’ll figure out “action” and how incidents, not tone alone, make for entertaining drama that plays beyond the film festival circuit.
Still, there’s style and a vivid sense of place in this most unusual movie, a film of future tech and sonic booming jets and unelectrified farms where the work is still done by hand, the way it has been for hundreds of years.
That makes this “Walk” long, but rewarding in the end.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast:Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Noutnapha Soydara, Por Silatsa, Vilouna Phetmany
Credits: Directed by Mattie Do, scripted by Christopher Larsen and Douangmany Soliphanh. A Yellow Veil release.
Running time: 1:51
It isn’t his “Twilight” stardom or his piece of the Harry Potter universe that has me intrigued to see Robert Pattinson’s take on “Batman.”
The director isn’t a lure either. We’ve had Burton and Nolan. Other filmmakers’ imprint on the franchise has been fleeting.
But the startling variety of roles R. Patts has taken on, with varying degrees of success, suggest a curiosity that could make an interesting rich, reclusive and haunted Dark Knight.
“The Batman” opens March 4.
Movie Nation 