So many things have gone wrong since “Death on the Nile” was announced, cast and put in the can.
There was a pandemic that stopped the world in its tracks. Co-star Armie Hammer had his #MeToo moment, a meltdown that imperils what’s left of his career. And Disney bought out Fox, relegating the picture to a “whatever” release strategy.
It’s no wonder “Death,” the latest film of Agatha Christie’s novel and the second adaptation helmed by and starring Sir Kenneth Branagh, has a dispiriting hint of “Oh, that’ll do” about it.
It’s not nearly as much fun as “Murder on the Orient Express,” even as the production values — the set design and Hollywood trickery involved in recreating a late 1930s steamer excursion up the Nile — dazzle, the cast impresses (at least on paper) and the Christie plot bears up beautifully under the strain.
There’s a playfulness and modernization to that casting that pays off. Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo plays a world-weary blues singer along for the odyssey, a woman whose sexy guitar-playing and singing — dubbed in tunes by Sister Rosette Tharpe — leave the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh) blushing and a tad flabbergasted. The real Tharpe came along just after the film’s time-setting, but as the film’s opening scene puts poison gas on the World War I battlefield, and deployed by the Belgians whom the younger Poirot is serving with, a year before the Germans unleashed that horror on the world, we’re reminded this isn’t meant to be taken terribly seriously.
But there’s still something bordering on sublime in this sequel, with its dinner jackets and evening gowns, Poirot (WWI) back story, oversexed jitterbugging to birth-of-rock blues that wouldn’t exist for a decade, sexy sirens and femme fatales and murders most foul, all in the name of money.
Gal Gadot is Linette, the “Golden Girl” heiress whose first trip to a nightclub dance floor allows her to steal Simon, the fiance (Hammer) of her “best friend,” the somewhat less rich but romantically ravenous Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey). Poirot witnesses all, and renders words of warning.
“Ah love, it is not safe.”
It is the wedding party of Linette and Simon, seeking to shake stalker Jacqueline, that books this luxe steamboat passage up the Nile, with Poirot a late add-on guest. Other relatives and friends are played by Russell Brand, as a doctor, Oscar-winner Annette Bening, Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) as the niece of our invited-entertainment, blues singer Salome (Okonedo), and a reunion of the former comic duo Dawn French (“The Vicar of Dibley”) and Jennifer Saunders (“Absolutely Fabulous”).
“Death on the Nile” is a movie of immaculate compositions, flawless model and digital effects, and juicy observations on love and money.
And we learn more about our mysterious and famous hero. We’ve seen the WWI affair that left Poirot single, in need of his elaborate mustache, now a bachelor who loses himself in tiny, exquisite desserts.
“Love fever,” he laments. “I was sick with it once. It left me enough regrets to last a lifetime.”
Salome is similarly jaded. “I’ve had a handful of husbands, each one of’em a handful.”
But after a near miss at some famous ruins, a second murder attempt at one of the passengers succeeds. There’s a body on board, and a murderer amongst us. Poirot, invited to more or less prevent this sort of thing, must figure out who it is, and as others are knocked off before they dock (the crew is largely removed from this story) the survivors wonder if the Belgian case-cracker is all he’s cracked up to be.
Besides, every fresh body or injury reduces the field of suspects, making his deductions easier, right?
I love Branagh in this part and I liked this movie. Some of the tinkering with the plot — anachronistic as it is — adds surprises, even if you’ve seen the earlier big screen version of this, from 1978, that’s making the rounds on many streaming services these days.
And yet for all its costumed, beautifully-decorated luxury and star-glossed sheen, “Nile” is a letdown from Branagh’s take on “Orient Express.” He casts funny people like French and Saunders and Brand, and there’s nothing funny, pithy or witty for them to say or do.
The script is as arid as the desert just beyond the river’s banks.
Branagh and Gadot’s characters are ably fleshed-out. Bening, Okonedo, Mackey and Wright have enough scenes to make strong impressions. Tom Bateman, as a loud, ever-smiling Poirot pal with a secret lover on board, has far too many. And Hammer’s faithless fiance seems reduced in scope, perhaps thanks to afterthought editing.
There’s little in the way of vituperative envy in the potential villains, little the viewer can invest in as we try to deduct from what we and Poirot observe and take in.
That adds up to a “Death on the Nile” that never lets us forget its quality and attention to detail, but forgets to be much in the way of fun.
Rating: PG-13 for violence, some bloody images, and sexual material
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Sophie Okonedo, Armie Hammer, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Leticia Wright, Emma Mackey, Russell Brand, Tom Bateman, Alia Fazal and Susannah Fielding.
Credits: Directed by Kenneth Branagh, scripted by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. A 20th Century release.
“A Grand Romantic Gesture” is a wistful romance in a minor key, a flash of “love, the second (or maybe last) time around” with no flash at all.
It’s always a shame when a romantic comedy with characters who aren’t teenagers falls short, doubly-so when it’s a rom-com built around a clever conceit — two 50something amateurs cast as the leads in a suburban Canadian workshop production of “Romeo & Juliet.”
They’re shoved on stage, try to start their lines, and our Juliet giggles self-consciously, and speaks for them and us and anybody not soaking wet behind the ears when she protests, “I don’t REMEMBER being young!”
British character lead GinaMcKee (“Notting Hill,””In the Loop”) is the newly-laid off Ava, bums-rushed into taking a cooking class by a husband (Rob Stewart) and married and pregnant daughter (Rose Reynolds) who talk as if she isn’t even in the room as they plan her unwanted “retirement” for her.
Her rage-whisking her ingredients tells one and all that class isn’t for her. But she’s conned into joining this other adult ed class down the hall, the one with a pretentious ditz (Gregory Ambrose Calderone) director who would rather have two people he figures are the right age for the priest and the nurse as his leads than have his girlfriend fall in love with the dude he’s cast as Romeo.
Thus, Simon (Douglas Hodge of “The Great” and “Joker”) is paired up with Ava, and Shakespeare’s poetry and the romance of it all gets the better of them. Well, him first.
“Give me my sin again,” he reads, and lays one on her, smack dab on the lips.
“No MAKING OUT on the stage,” director Ryan protests as Ava recoils. But boy, does that smooch get her thinking. And dreaming. And imagining.
As her daughter’s life comes a bit undone and she moves back home, as Ava keeps the fact that she changed classes and isn’t learning to cook as her first secret, all gets far more complicated as the leads start to develop feelings for each other, on and off the stage.
Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin breaks up this longish/slow-building rom-com with snippets from the play as intertitles — “Tempt not a desperate man,” “A Madness most discrete,” etc.
She further breaks up the continuity with testimonials/confessions to the camera, what look like counseling sessions for Ava, Simon and Simon’s wife Roz (Linda Kash).
“Marriage isn’t for sissies. Rule Number One? You want to stay married, don’t fall in love with someone else.”
I like the leads and their “Should we/should we not” chemistry, even in the low-speed, flatly-shot conversations that point them towards love. And the dizzy daughter and her dizzy marriage (Dylan Llewellyn plays her puppet-obsessed flake of a husband) plays as dopey cute.
But “A Grand Romantic Gesture” botches such gestures, the few attempted, and never produces a stand-out moment that tugs at the heart or tickles the funny bone. A random amusing line here and there is about all we’re left with. A self-absorbed young woman bumps and brushes by Simon and Ava, which the native Brit feels is out of character.
“That wasn’t very CANADIAN of her!”
Not enough is made of the difference between the “acting” part of the romance, and the “real” part. Stumbling towards a psychological explanation for their behavior is a scripted afterthought.
That, coupled with the deflating nature of the “gestures,” with nothing “grand” or particularly “romantic” about any of them, leaves this Canadian comedy dead on the page before it dies on the stage.
Rating: unrated, profanity, adult situations
Cast: Gina McKee, Douglas Hodge, Rose Reynolds, Linda Kash, Dylan Llewellyn, Rob Stewart
Credits: Scripted and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin. A Gravitas Ventures release.
A bigger Saturday than expected pushed the latest”Jackass” film comfortably above $20 million on its opening weekend.
That’s probably about twice its production costs. $23 million, it’ll probably end up with $35-40 million, all in.
Johnny Knoxville, if he hangs it up as a comical stunt dummy, will have started in five movies that opened at #1. And those are just the ones with “Jackass” in the title.
“Moonfall” didn’t get off the ground, at all. A $10 opening in a pandemic isn’t terrible, but the thing allegedly cost 15 times that. Soooo.
A running gag for some of us who’ve interviewed actor turned director and “Arrested Development” narrator Ron Howard over the years was to finish the chat with an admission.
“Actually, what I’m really here for is to get an update on Clint. What’s he up to?”
This always gets a laugh, and always brings up a delicious anecdote. Here’s one I remember when we talked as Howard’s “The Paper” was coming out.
“I was just meeting Tom (Hanks) for this movie about Apollo 13 we’re doing,” Ron related. “He’s looking at the script, some photos of NASA at the time. And he looks at one and says ‘LOTTttttttta people in these Mission Control scenes.” He pauses and gives me a look. “‘GOTTA be a part for Clint in there somewhere!'”
In a business rightly criticized for nepotism, pretty much right from the beginning, the Howard Boys were the adorable poster kids for why that isn’t always a bad thing. Ron, a child star who evolved into an Oscar winning director, could always find a spot for his kid brother Clint Howard, also a child star, on his sets. “My good luck charm,” Ron always called him.
Ron’s always had this folksy, upbeat All American, boy or man next door image, the sort of filmmaker who calls critics up to thank them for nice reviews. You always figured “That boy was raised right,” and as generations have grown up with him, many still watching his acting high water mark — as adorable Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show” — we figured we had the proof.
But go on any Hollywood gossip site and look at the whispers about how rough child stars have it. http://www.crazydaysandnights.net, sort of the QAnon of salacious Hollywood, is filled with “blind items” about cruelty, “stage parents” and much worse going back decades and happening even today.
Corey Feldman and Corey Haim are much more the rule for kids put through this “growing up way too fast” in a fast and loose business and town.
How did “The Boys” turn out so normal? OK, how did RON turn out so normal? Clint, funny as he’s been, long has had the “not as easy a row to hoe” vibe.
“The Boys” is their affectionate, sometimes revealing co-memoir of how their Oklahoma-born parents, actors who changed their names to Rance and Jean Howard, did it.
The sons practically skip through the pages, talking about this or that stage in their lives, what their parents told them about their pre-marriage childhoods and what they were able to learn much later on. We follow little Ronnie onto the set of “Make Room for Daddy,” the Danny Thomas show of the late 1950s. “Danny Meets Andy Griffith” was a folksy and somewhat sharp-edged and mean “back-door pilot” for what became “The Andy Griffith Show,” a casting coup that set the Howards, boys and parents, up for life. Or so you’d think.
Ron and later Clint, who became one of the funniest silent recurring characters in TV history, wearing a cowboy outfit his momma dressed him in — “No thank you, Leon.” — relate the later life realization of what their struggling actor dad gave up to make them so good at so young an age and what their mom — the first actor in the family, sacrificed to make it all work.
The siblings, switching back and forth several times a chapter, note how their father became a child-actor whisperer, teaching his kids — neither the older Ron nor younger brother Clint could read when they started out as tykes — how to find the core truth of a scene and “inculcating” them with their lines and motivations.
A Method for Moppets was born, and Rance would continue this for years and years, so long as each was young enough to require having a parent or guardian on set — from “Andy Griffith” to Clint’s “Gentle Ben,” “The Music Man” (Ronnie) to “The Red Pony” (Clint).
The brothers come off like their public personas in print — earnest, well-mannered family man so wholesome he was “Father Ron with the collar” in Hollywood, and wild child and sometimes hellion and lifelong wiseass Clint (his “Seinfeld” episode remains a stand-out, because he stole it).
We hear about Ron’s early fascination with the “tricks” of the trade, how to fake drowning, how to get a performance of “Wells Fargo Wagon” or “Gary, Indiana” into “The Music Man” when he was and remains “no singer.”
Andy Griffith and that show’s director gave him his first film camera. The first person to tell him “You’re gonna be a director someday” was also on that set — Howard Morris, aka “Ernest T. Bass.” Ron never forgot, and cast Morris in one of his early films. And yes, that’s exactly what we’d expect Ron Howard to do.
Clint’s “How could this be legal?” stories of child acting with animals like a black bear in sweaty, humid Florida (“Gentle Ben”) and having to kill a buzzard in “Red Pony” can be cute or chilling.
The sons grew up appreciating their father’s matter of fact way of treating every question honestly, from “Is there a Santa Claus?” to pre-adolescent queries about sex, alcoholism (they worked with a few folks who had the smell about them). And they rather belatedly consider all that their long-sacrificing actress-mother gave up to give them everything.
They were the “most honest child actor managers” in Hollywood history, the sons declare. The parents made their own money, took less of a “management” fee from their earnings than parents generally did and lived modestly so that the kids had fat bank accounts to start life as their child-actor days ended.
The kids grew up, if not immune to the pleasures and indulgences of Hollywood (Clint had substance abuse problems), at least prepared to deal with most of the pitfalls show business and life around it promised for them as adults. Humility comes off as an under-rated “teachable moment” in their memories of their parents.
It’s not a scandalous book by any means. Ron gives hints of the “adult” nature of the “Andy Griffith” set, that there were signs Griffith showed a violent temper back home. Grownups drinking on the job and cussing around a kid seems more scandalous today than back then. There’s a lot of noting how things could be looser, and not necessarily to the benefit of child actors, in days when “getting the scene” might include shortcuts, drinking on the job wasn’t even frowned upon and spousal abuse was a punch line.
There’s zero discussion of the racial attitudes of the day, reflected in how monochromatic film and TV shows both appeared in were.
But courtship and romance, college and “Happy Days,” “American Graffiti” and cocaine addiction all are touched on in this rosy portrayal of how one raises a child actor to be dependable, be professional, be kind and not turn out a brat.
At home or on the set, Ron’s memories are the warmest and as you’d expect, Clint’s are the funniest. Well, Ron’s memories of getting his directing start from B movie king Roger Corman are warm, and a hoot.
Neither ever uses the word “blessed,” but “gratitude” spills off every page that they fill with star encounters, making friends with Richard Dreyfuss and Henry Winkler, movie making memories and off camera hijinks.
The kids came out all right, and “The Boys” lets us see how that happened, and all the places it might not have had Jean and Rance not kept their eyes on the ball and their loving hearts on their sleeves, from each boy’s birth until each parent passed away having a pretty good idea of a job well done.
The Boys, by Ron Howard and Clint Howard. William Morrow, 393 pages, $35.99.
A “slow cinema” Japanese period piece, this Roger DVDseed offering comes from FilmMovement and is now in the Brevard Co. Florida library system vis its Titusville branch.
I remember liking it last year when I reviewed it. Hope the folks here like their movies with subtitles, too.
“Why are you telling me all this?” the hero wants to know when a villain downloads another large chunk of exposition and conspiracy in the South African thriller “Indemnity.”
It’s a question I ask myself scores of times a year, every time a movie lurches to a halt, every instance of “over-explaining” screenwriters feel the need to shove into their pictures. In “Indemnity,” this show-stopping nonsense happens more than once. Or twice.
Writer-director Travis Taute’s lurching, lumbering paranoid thriller is “The Bourne Variation,” another “Conspiracy Theory” with a wrongly-accused man desperately hunting for the sinister people and forces that framed him for murder.
It’s not half bad, with a couple of decent fights — and a few where the fight choreographer’s instructions are a bit too obvious — and a fine finale, the scenes that come after two or three “explanations” too many.
Veteran South African actor Jarrid Geduld (seen in “Black Sails” and “The Brothers Grimsby” in the Western Hemisphere) stars as Theo Abrams, a Cape Town firefighter on leave with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He’s seeing a shrink. Still he drinks. He rages. He blacks out.
And then his journalist wife (Nicole Fortuin) gets a tip from a fellow (Abduragman Adams) we’ve seen being chased and shot at by sharp-shooting goons who mean business. There must be some reason Theo’s on this list of people a big defense contractor is keeping.
Before she or he or anybody else can get a handle on what that might be, wife Angie is dead in the bed next to Theo, and the cops abruptly show up to haul him away.
Det. Williamson (Gail Mabalane) may have sympathy for her fellow first responder, a stressed dad whose kid may become a ward of the state. But that doesn’t matter to her boss (Andre Jacobs). It’s the hoosgow for Theo.
Damned if the guy arrested and in the back of the transport van with him doesn’t try to kill Theo. Damned if he isn’t armed with a gun. Thus comes the first in a long series of implausible escapes, topped by one half-ingenious one.
Theo must brawl, shoot, sprint and steal cars, get the drop on that one bad guy who has a phone that will “direct” him, help Theo figure out why these dudes have the same tattoo (a paranoid thriller cliche) and get to the bottom of it all. Or the top, depending on how high this conspiracy reaches.
There are some pithy quips, in Afrikaans with English subtitles — “In every way this ends badly for me, it ends badly for you” to one hotel clerk he seizes at gunpoint.
The fights are brutish and personal, even if we sometimes wonder if we’re seeing a rehearsed-and-walked thru jiu jitsu demonstration, with each fighter telegraphing his moves to the other. Still, the transport van punch-out, the elevator smash-up, a fire station massacre, all propel “Indemnity” forward with force and verve.
It’s a straight-up genre picture, and that’s what these require — breathless forward motion. We’ve seen variations on this character, this plot. What matters is pacing and innovative action beats.
But it isn’t just the damned “Let me explain what’s happening to you” pauses that bring this beast to a halt. Little lapses in logic, strained efforts to tie this all together with Theo’s PTSD triggers, mentions of Theo’s “particular skills” and news clips and scenes that point to the objectives of the Big Conspiracy slow things down and make it plain to see what this is all about — too plain.
There’s little pace and almost no mystery to the proceedings. We get a surprise here and there, a nasty foe (Louw Venter), a bit too much time hanging with the cops who talk about urgency, but don’t act like they have a sense of it.
That makes this genre pic a victim of the greatest pitfall a movie like this can stumble into. It’s an 80 minute thriller loosely wrapped in a 124 minute package.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Jarrid Geduld, Nicole Fortuin, Gail Mabalane, Abduragman Adams, Louw Venter and Andre Jacobs
Credits: Scripted and directed by Travis Taute. A Magnet release.
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