If you like movies with “pluck,” here’s one that uses the phrase “up by your bootstraps” more than once. And there’s nothing more plucky or All American than that.
“Women is Losers” is a tale of Latina struggle and overcoming discrimination, of making your own American dream, and of the way things were before Roe v. Wade.
Actress turned writer-director Lissette Feliciano doesn’t give herself enough screen time to do all of those themes justice. And she’s overly fond of having characters turn to the camera to deliver sermons when the “message” is already right there in front of us. But pluck wins out and makes this one a winner.
We meet Celina (Lorenza Izzo of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”) as she’s having a loud shouting match with her baby daddy (Bryan Craig of TV’s “Grand Hotel”) on the stoop in front of their San Francisco apartment building.
Mid-argument, she turns to the camera and suggests we go back to “the beginning” to see “how far we’ve come.”
The shouting match was happening in the early-70s. The story takes us back to the late ’60s, when Celina and her brassy buddy Marty (Chrissie Fit) were in Catholic school, dreaming big dreams, trying not to get too distracted by boys.
But their “older men” come home from Vietnam, and both wind up pregnant.
“We’re not going to let this ruin our lives.”
Two teenaged girls go to a “use the back door” dentist Marty’s beau has suggested for abortions. Only one walks out, because of how dangerous “back alley abortions” were, way back then.
“Women is Losers” lets us see the scar that stays on Celina’s heart from that experience, and her struggles to get a job without a degree, get an apartment as a single mother away from her judgmental and even cruel parents (Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda) and swim upstream against a society that was living down to James Brown’s soul hit warning.
“This is a Man’s World.”
Filmmaker Feliciano serves up gender discrimination in housing, employment and banking, in addition to the life Celina has sentenced herself to for one night of unprotected sex, a woman’s world in America pre-Roe v. Wade.
Characters occasionally “breaking the third wall,” a banker delivering his “I didn’t really say” his institution discriminates based on race and gender, Celina grousing about this obstacle or that one, is just one of the ways “plucky” translates as a little bit messy in “Women is Losers.”
The asides are often cute, as is a party homage to “West Side Story,” a cha-cha courtship dance set to a pre-Santana version of Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” and a “How the Chinese Made it in San Francisco” history lesson, in black and white.
We glimpse an Applebees in an early ’70s San Fran street scene (it was born in Georgia in 1980), hear Donna Summer singing “She works hard for the money” a decade before she recorded it, and see all sorts of sexism, domestic discord and violence and other issues brought up without much more than a glancing treatment in the script.
Not every kindness shown Celina — her bank boss (Simu Liu) mentors her, teaches her the “Chinese way” of making it in America — seems to come with strings attached. But the ones that aren’t bizarre coincidences are.
But Izzo is terrific in a positive-role-model role, Bauer is amusingly vile (and believable) and “Women is Losers” hits home with its messages, even if it struggles a bit to tie it all into Roe v. Wade.
Rating: unrated, some violence, profanity, adult themes
Cast: Lorenza Izzo, Bryan Craig, Simu Liu, Chrissie Fit, Liza Wiel, Steven Bauer and Alejandra Miranda
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lissette Feliciano. An HBO Max release.
It’s one of the most notorious scams of WWII, using a corpse to convince the fascists that the Allies were invading somewhere other than Sicily when they were, in fact, invading Sicily.
Great cast for this January historical thriller. Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly MacDonald, Jason Isaacs and Penelope Wilton are the stars, keeping that stiff upper lip thing going as they engaged in a classic act of espionage.
No. It did not. It didn’t meet the Friday projections of “Well, at least it’ll clear $60-65.”
A $56 million opening for a very long movie isn’t bad. Not bad at all. And it’ll do business after “Venom 2” is utterly defanged. But that’s a let down.
“Venom 2” fell off over 65% to $32 million, meeting its projections.
“Addams Family 2” benefited from a lack of family film competition to take in another $10M.
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Oh lordy, what’s that pothead prophet, Doper Dave, stuck his foot in THIS time?
Transgender issues? Again? Is there an Eddie Murphy confession Dave Chapelle will eventually get around to making? What is UP with that, my racial slur-er? Joining arms with J.K. Rowling? Identifying with her as a “TERF?”
That all points to a better title for his “last special for a minute” finale for Netflix. He calls it “The Closer,” as in wrapping things up, a King of Comedy headliner, a closing act worthy of that master salesman label “Closer,” and an end to his nearly twenty year long argument with the transgender community.
Dude should have called it “Baggage.”
The bulk of Chapelle’s “The Closer” is spent leaning into a subject that keeps him controversial, when that seems more pointless by the day. He’s transcended the need for controversy. He’s THE humorist/comic-cultural critic of the moment. And his blundering attempt to claim he’s not “punching down” by continuing his slap-fight with the ever-lengthening-acronym LGBTQ minority community over this, his declaration that the phrase “punching down” offends him, never helps.
“Closer” begins with promise; riffs on COVID, his single-man superspreader carelessness in Texas, chewing on Black folks beating up Asian folks over COVID on Youtube.
He does that thing he does where he sounds serious and sensitive and thoughtful, only to undercut Humane, Sweet Dave with a killer punchline. The first version of that gag? It’s a bit about the latest news on UFOs, his theory and his movie pitch, that “they were here, long before us, and left. ” And now they’ve returned and want “their planet back.”
“I’m calling it, ‘Space Jews.'”
And then he sidles into his main topic of the night for this Detroit crowd — cancel culture and the folks running it, most often people represented by one of the letters in LGBTQ.
The rapper DaBaby, he notes, “KILLED a n—a,” but it wasn’t until he had a homophobic onstage meltdown that he faced cancelation.
“You can kill, but you’d better not hurt a gay person’s feelings…”
He traces his “transphobic” and homophobic baggage to a San Francisco news article nearly 20 years ago, asserts that every criticism since has cited “those same talking points,” and starts his long discourse on defusing all that by A) noting a trans comic he befriended and helped out and B) the price that friend paid for sticking up for Dave through one of his many blasts of trans backlash.
Chapelle can seem a paragon of reason and above-it-all magnanimity when he joins the chorus of comics (especially) who describe this gay “cancel culture” community as “too sensitive, too brittle.”
“Gangsta gay,” those people who rioted at Stonewall, he says. “THEM I respect.”
His “the Defense rests” is far from his funniest special, although there are almost enough laughs to make it worth your while.
Chapelle’s sharpest observations are the career-imperiling minefield any celebrity faces via Twitter or — shudder — “going out.” He relates several episodes where he says he was “trapped” and/or “drunk” and got into this argument or that smackdown when confronted in public.
How funny you see that depends on your reaction to this explanation for one fight. “Bitch, I didn’t even KNOW you were a woman!”
He’s thoughtful about the “racial component of feminism,” calls himself a feminist, and then turns around and labels himself a “TERF,” just like J.K. Rowling.
I noticed director Stan Lathan didn’t show the audience much in this special, and not at all until one defiant slap at Chapelle’s LGBTQ critics inspired a few folks to stand up and applaud.
Few comics performing today work from as deep inside “self-satisfied” as this guy. Not quite Kevin Hart, but close. All his stories give him the last word and make him come off as the quickest, the wittiest and the wisest. Perhaps if he saw that in himself, he’d better understand “punching down.”
Chapelle can attack “mean” “bathroom bills” from reactionary state legislatures, and go for a laugh with “frumpy dyke.” He can see racism in the speed with which gay rights blossomed when compared with the slow pace of African American equality, and land his best punch with “Gay people are a minority, until they need to be white again,” and yet brag about the time he “whipped the toxic masculinity right out of that (lesbian) b—h!”
The average viewer — NOT “these transgenders” who “want me DEAD” — might find common ground in the phrase “My pronoun game wasn’t as (sharp) as it is today,” and enjoy his mockery of “Tiki Torch white people,” aka “MICHIGAN white people,” biting the hands that bought tickets to “The Closer.”
But the best thing to come out of his “last” Netflix special might be this promise. That this is “The Closer,” that he’s not wading into that alphabet soup any more, because, as he puts it, “I’m not transgender…I’m not even gay.”
Chapelle’s obsession with this one subject, which he keeps “explaining” over and over again, reminded me of late period Lenny Bruce, when he took to reading his court transcripts to audiences in lieu of doing his “act.”
Chapelle’s “rich and famous,” he reminds us. Huge. “Clifford” big, he adds. He should start acting like it.
And maybe, now that he’s stuck up for Kevin Hart losing the Oscar hosting gig for the umpteenth time, now that he’s appealed for the uncanceling of DaBaby, we can all move on.
He certainly could stand to.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity, racial slurs
Cast: Dave Chapelle
Credits Directed by Stan Lathan, scripted by Dave Chapelle. A Netflix release.
The Turkish police procedural “Grudge” toys with the idea of really saying something blunt and chilling about Turkish justice, Turkish policing and the powerlessness of The People, and only loses its nerve in the third act. The ending is the final “cop out” of this decently-plotted Around the World with Netflix thriller, titled “Kin” in Turkish.
A star vehicle for veteran Turkish star Yilmaz Erdogan (apparently unrelated to Turkey’s current authoritarian president), it’s about a decorated police chief inspector who is ambushed in a taxi, kills his assailant, and then covers up the death in ways that make us wonder why it wasn’t self defense. The film unravels this mystery with varying degrees of urgency, springing a couple of third act twists that land as genuine surprises.
And it’s not half bad. Similar to Denzel Washington’s “Out of Time,” it lacks the “ticking clock” pulse-pounding suspense of a cop trying to stay one step ahead of an investigation that will implicate him, desperate to solve the case and maybe tidy it up before his subordinates get to the real truth.
Here’s the promise it makes. Chief Inspector Harun (Erdogan) lectures the newest cop on his “team” (Cem Yigit Uzümoglu) about an inept interrogation and lays some hard truth about policing in Istanbul.
“Everybody’s a little guilty until our suspicions are eliminated.” Damn, that’s chilling. And you know that ethos isn’t limited to police work in Asia Minor.
“It’s easy to be good” he tells the rookie (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed). “It’s a lot harder to be just.“
But when the “just” Harun is jumped by a cabbie, we remember the opening scene, a poor man being arrested in a slum section of the city. We remember the tearful children watching this. And we recall the film’s title.
The first great twist is what happens to the body of the cabbie the next day. We see it dangling from a construction crane, within window view of police headquarters. Whatever Harun’s crack team expects to dig up about how it got there and who put it there, he’s in a panic about wiping down the scene of the crime and what the city’s many CCTV cameras might have captured about his part in that night’s killing.
His top lieutenant (Ruzgar Aksoy) is in the dark. But somebody else sees him palming a flash drive, hastily trying to finger a suspect to save his trusted boss (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan) from the public humiliation this case delivers.
Director Türkan Derya, who works mostly in Turkish TV, does a competent job of leading the viewer through Harun’s scramble — tracking down, threatening and torturing old informants, revisiting — in flashback — earlier cases that seem to tie into this.
Erdogan plays the guy who acts if he has something to hide even as he maintains a professional, even moral, demeanor in the office and on the case. That key witness he shoots? It’s almost an accident.
Hints of a mystery woman (Duygu Sarisin), clues from the past and a growing hit list of cops and others let Harun unravel things just ahead of his team. But will that keep him out of trouble, and should we be rooting for him in the first place?
I liked the performances and the plot more than the script itself, which manages only a few punchy cop-speak exchanges and pushes at least one of its twists into the third act, when it would have served the picture better had it been a driving force of the narrative earlier on.
The foreshadowing is entirely too obvious, of the “Send my driver home, I’ll be driving myself” (Uh-oh!) variety.
And that ending feels like this Erdogan was pulling his punches in fear of messaging that might rile THAT Erdogan and Turkey’s police in general.
But “Grudge” comes damned close to checking off all the boxes, and manages to get just enough right to be worth trying on for size.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, smoking
Cast: Yilmaz Erdogan, Duygu Sarisin, Ruzgar Aksoy, Cem Yigit Uzümoglu and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan.
Credits: Directed by Türkan Derya, scripted by Yilmaz Erdogan. A Netflix release.
Swooning predictions of an epic, maybe a franchise record opening for Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond should have been silenced by its Thursday night previews.
“No Time to Die” did a little over $6, compared to “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” clearing over $8 the Thursday before.
“Carnage” opened at about $90, “Die” is on track, after Thursday and a $23 million Friday, to manage $62-64. “Skyfall” tallied $88 million on opening.
Yes, there’s still a pandemic keeping people at home and yes, the Bond audience is older.
The second weekend of the Venom sequel is seeing a 65% plunge. Maybe $31 million by midnight Sunday.
Wistful, melancholy and sadly incomplete, “A Case of Blue” wanders into a new retiree’s drift into his past as a way of owning up to a present he’s checked out of.
It’s a fine showcase for its stars, but a little frustrating to grapple with because of all it leaves out in its 80 downbeat minutes.
Richard, played by dulcet-voiced TV veteran Stephen Schnetzer (“Another World,” various “Law & Orders”), gets a surprise party on the day he retires from his accounting job, and lots of looks of concern from his wife (Tracy Shayne) and daughter (Ursula Abbott) when he gets home.
“Stop pretending to be the Rock of Gibraltar,” his wife complains. Their concern seems more a plot contrivance than anything we can see on his face or in his behavior. But like all retirees, Richard needs something to focus on. That’s why his daughter gave him the gift of life drawing classes with a New York college. He wanted to be an artist before he settled on a “career” and a more normal life.
The classes give him deja vu from the start. They’re in the same studio where he studied as a teen some 50 years before, with the same “one minute pose” exercises. And then there’s the day an exotic beauty comes in to model for them.
Richard is literally slack-jawed when (Annapurna Sriram of “In Case of Emergency” and TV’s “The Black List”) disrobes. She’s the spitting image of his first great love, also an artist’s model, from back in his student days.
When she sees how he’s drawing her — “That’s not how I posed” — she’s a little freaked out. Richard wonders if he’s imagining this seeming rift in time. His old work pal (Ken Baltin) figures this is “some serious ‘Twilight Zone’ s–t!”
Richard isn’t subtle when he tries to find out her name when she abruptly stops posing for the class. He stalks her via a poster she hung up for a folk singer friend scheduled to perform at New York’s famed Cafe Wha, still a folk venue as it was when Richard was young.
They kick him out when she sets eyes on him. It’s only when he risks getting punched by her date (Jay Devore) that enough information is exchanged to explain some of what’s going on. Her name is Amelia. He must have been in love with her grandmother, Marcy.
“You know how creepy this is, right?”
A “relationship,” of sorts, begins between the retiree from New Jersey’s Volvo suburbs and the NoHo/SoHo “Bohemian” Amelia, an artist herself and a “magnet” for Washington Square Park “misfit” lads from art, music, Wall Street or wherever.
Writer-director Dana H. Glazer (“Intermezzo,” and the documentaries “Parents of the Revolution” and “The Evolution of Dad”) lays out expectations of a late life crisis drama/male wish fulfillment fantasy and wisely sets out to upend those expectations.
But the “creepy” vibe isn’t disarmed with the vivacious Amelia’s wisecrack, and Richard’s decision to join her and her entourage for a costume party in a club is merely a showcase for “old guy in the club” jabs.
“Don’t set off your Life Alert bracelet!” “Why aren’t you at the nursing home?”
Amelia’s motivations — either as real-life temptation or imagined life-crisis fantasy — are never made clear.
And Richard’s “journey” seems stumbling, abrupt and missing a few steps — make that SEVERAL steps — on the road from “lost since retirement” to “purpose.”
The players make “A Case of Blue” pleasant enough to sit through, but the movie plays like an appetizer that never amounts to more than an appeteaser.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Stephen Schnetzer, Annapurna Sriram, Tracy Shayne, Jay Devore and Ken Baltin
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana H. Glazer. A 1091 release.
There was a stretch back in the ’90s and early 2000s when every American network sitcom did an episode or two about how to get “out of the ‘friend zone.'”
So think of the French rom-com “Friendzone” as “Friends” with less coffee and more nudity, and in French. Because I sure did.
This time-killer of a romance has a touching moment or…OK, there’s just one. And there’s a laugh or two. Yes. Two, one of them a fake-out when we think a character’s been killed off. Because THAT would be edgy.
But no. There’s nothing about this Around the World With Netflix outing that doesn’t seem as familiar as a “Scrubs” rerun, with even the nudity playing “A Shot in the Dark” games with the whole “caught skinny dipping on a nude-friendly beach” bit.
Mickaël Lumière (“Mon Bebe,” aka “Sweetheart”) stars as Titi, a male nurse we meet as he joins his girlfriends/fellow nurses (Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult) for a bachelorette party weekend on the Riviera.
They’re free spirits, confident, beautiful women who join the crowd at their resort in ditching their bikinis and hitting the water. Titi? He’s a bit of a lump of the “I’m going to read a little and go to bed” (in French with English sutbitles, or dubbed) type.
Still, the water looks inviting, so after everybody else has gone, he strips, takes a dip and gets into a predicament with the gorgeous Rose (Eva Danino). She steps on a Weever fish, he knows how to help because he’s a nurse. And yet, he’s buck naked and “It’s too complicated to explain.”
Still, he nurses her, gets her back to her room, and…doesn’t take advantage of her obvious pleasure at being cared for, massaged and what not.
They get together again back in the city, and she seems to enjoy his company, likes joking around about what they’ll name their children after.
She’s a children’s fashion entrepreneur, so he goes shopping with her. They Netflix movies as he gives her foot massages and she whines about her jerk of an ex.
But let Titi — short for Thibault — show up well-dressed with thoughts of romance and see what happens.
“A date?” “Oui.” With who?” “You!” Ok then, but did you bring condoms? Before he can admit that he did, she bursts out laughing. “Wouldn’t THAT be CRAZY?”
He is in the “friend zone,” which at least sounds prettier in French (zone amie).
“It’s SYSTEMIC with you,” he’s scolded.
Good thing he’s got this hot trio of ladyfriends to help him change that. They propose a bit of coaching, tell him to lie about leaving the country for a bit so that he can hit “restart” on their relationship. Let the “makeover montages set to music” begin.
Maud (Azem) is the perfectly-conditioned lesbian getting him into shape and instructing him how to sexually please a woman. Lulu (Camara) will drag him to her dance classes. Alex (Arnoult) will work on his attitude.
“You’re not some doormat!” “You talk way too much!” “No laughing!” “Ambiguity is the key to intimacy.”
They give him a test run, send him up to a bar to hit on this lovely woman there, and his blunt, laid-back vibe clicks.
“I’m normally a saint. I don’t drink or smoke. I work in social services (he’s a nurse in a pediatric hospital). And no sex on the first date.”
That’s all it takes to land the digits and the interest of “The French Kardashian,” the sexy and quirky French influencer Jennifer (Eloïse Valli).
But wouldn’t you know it, Rose has gone back to he jerk record-producer ex (Maxime Gasteuil) while all this is going on.
The makeover montages are generic in the extreme, the pop selected here ranges from a synth-loaded club mix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” and Machiavel’s “Fly.”
The slapstick, what little there is of it, works. Jenni’s appetite for sex, seriously high-end cuisine and selfie’s is worth half a chuckle.
But “Friendzone” flatlines for long stretches as it meanders towards the classic rom-com finale.
Use it as colorful background noise or to brush up on your French dating slang, because that’s all it’s good for.
Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sexual situations
Cast: Mickaël Lumière, Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult, Eva Danino, Maxime Gasteuil and Eloïse Valli
Credits: Directed by Charles Van Tieghem, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Charles Van Tieghem. A Netflix release.
Movie Nation 