Otherwise, they’re going to ruin his latest masterpiece.
Four strong players, Stradivarius instruments and a new work.
Can they get it together? A couple of famous faces play opposite four real love working musicians on this French hit.
This dry dramedy rolls out August 8 and August 15.
If puns are “the lowest and most groveling form of wit,” where does the jokey/dopey action comedy “Heads of State” sit on that scale?
It’s got puns. Groaners. Lots of them. And action film cliches and buddy comedy bickering and a ludicrous/obvious plot that calls attention to itself and mocks itself, as if that’ll stop us from doing the same.
A film starting out from “Let’s reunite those two supporting players from ‘Suicide Squad‘” as its big idea sets the bar pretty low. But Idris Elba and John Cena, as an “embattled” British Prime Minister (Yes, we know the PM’s not “Head of State.” Shaddup.) and movie-star/pop icon U.S. president thrown together to fight for their lives, NATO and the future handle the banter and the tough-guys-trash-talking-each-other business with ease.
“Drop warheads on foreheads?”
“Where’s your back-up?” “There IS no back-up!”
A kicker — “It’ll be great for our memoirs.”
Priyanka Chopra Jonas handles fight choreography with aplomb, and Paddy Considine tries to give us something — anything — interesting in his shade of villain.
“Hardcore Henry” and “Nobody” director Ilya Naishuller pulls out more of his Guy Ritchie editing tricks — boiling down entire harrowing escapes to short and silly “How’d you FIND us?” montages.
But damn, the been-there/needle-dropped that feeling is strong with this one. The “dumb” just won’t quit.
A trio of screenwriters, including a “Mission: Impossibl” duo do-over pile on the travel, the epic set pieces and the mayhem and try to find the fun in all of that.
When you’re putting Air Force One in a dogfight and staging a bloody ambush in Buñol, Spain’s over-the-top tomato-tossing food fight (La Tomatina), who cares about helicopter crashes, presidential limo chases and Jack Quaid as a gun-slinging not-really-amusing nerd of a CIA agent?
The story — a wildly popular president stops in London to meet an unpopular prime minister who all but endorsed his opponent in a recent election. One is great at working the press. The other? More statesmanlike.
“He still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press junket (promoting a movie) and a press conference!”
Maybe PM Sam Clarke is just jealous of Will M. Derringer’s cool name, and initials — “WMD” — and his box office take.
“The universe keeps telling me I look good with a gun in my hand!” the cinema’s once-and-future “Water Cobra” jokes.
But when the two try to mend fences on the way to a NATO summit on Air Force One, they’re shot down. They’ve got to get along, work together and fight and trick their way from Belarus to Warsaw and on to Trieste. Because somebody’s hijacked the CIA’s super surveillance ECHELON system and is plotting their demise, and NATO’s.
Jonas plays an ace MI-6 agent who used to have a thing with our PM. Quaid’s a Warsaw Station agent just tickled that his favorite action hero turned president is dropped into his care, if only briefly.
Agent Comer has just enough time to arm up in the cliched “Look at my ARSENAL” scene and load up The Beastie Boys (“Sabotage”) on the CD player.
A little Mötley Crüe here, some “Total Eclipse of the Heart” Bonnie Tyler there, and you’ve got your soundtrack to your formulaic action comedy.
Comedy mainstay Stephen Root is here to tip us about the tone they were going for, and plays maybe the least funny role in “Heads of State.” Wade Briggs, Katrina Durden and Alexander Kuznetsov are costumed, hair-dyed and shaved to look like everybody’s idea of a villain.
Look for Sharlto Copley in a single scene and “Mission: Impossible” vet Ingeborga Dapkunaite as a Belorusian sheep farmer.
But all those players are but pawns in the big, fat empty-headed action beats involving brawls, shoot-outs, chases and a hysterically high body count in a movie you don’t so much watch as “consume.”
It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.
Rating: PG-13, lots and lots of violence, some of it bloody.
Cast: John Cena, Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jack Quaid, Carla Gugino, Stephen Root, Sharlto Copley and Paddy Considine.
Credits: Directed by Ilya Naishuller, scripted by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.
Running time: 1:54
“How to brainstorm a genre screenplay” is trotted out and exposed for the amusing and mundane process it is in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s goof of a thriller, “Trans-Europ-Express.”
Every trope, all the cliches and archetypal characters, the “How do we get from Paris to Antwerp?” problem solving of the plot, where to introduce “the gun,” the obligatory nudity and sex — including 1960s bondage — it’s all laid bare in this spoof from the screenwriter of the obscurant “Last Year at Marienbad” and director of “Successive Slidings of Pleasure.”
Robbe-Grillet was a “cult” director, “cult” screenwriter and plainly a man with a sense of humor about the mental or erotic titillations that were his specialty. Because ’60s-dated or not, “Trans-Europ Express” still plays, still amuses and still “applies” when it comes to formula films like the one it sends up.
Three filmmakers — a director, producer and script supervisor — board a train in the Gare du Nord station in Paris. The moment they settle into a compartment, “We should set a film on a train like this” (in French with English subtitles) occurs to them.
The director (Robbe-Grillet) gets his script supervisor (Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his wife) to break out a tape recorder to take notes. It’s a suitcase-sized portable reel-to-reel, a ’60s tech joke “Austin Powers” missed. With the producer (Jérôme Lindon) pitching in, they conjure up a plot.
How does one get cocaine from Paris to Antwerp? Where can you buy a “false bottom suitcase?” Wouldn’t our “trafficker” be more likely to smuggle diamonds in and out of Antwerp?
An actor crosses their field of view. “Isn’t that (Jean-Louis) Trintignant? He’d be PERFECT” for this!
We see the trenchcoated Trintignant — of “And God Created Woman,” “Z,” “Under Fire” and in 2012’s “Amour” — side-eye everyone and everything, doing his best version of “sketchy.” He shops for a suitcase. “The trafficker model. Just kidding.”
He is eyed by the sexy stranger (Marie-France Pisier of “Cousin, Cousine” and Truffaut’s “Love on the Run”). Who is she? “An agent for a rival gang!” “An amateur detective?”
Over the course of the train ride, the trio dreams up an absurdly convoluted plot that involves multiple suitcases and multiple handoffs, legions of middle-men and women and an ever-evolving code-phrase about when one last saw “Father Pettijohn.”
Leaky bags of sugar are loaded into the suitcase for a dry run. A small semi-automatic pistol of the era is hidden in a hollowed out paperback novel (about trains). Cops and “fake police,” an inspector, a fake blind man (Ivo Pauwels) and others aid, pursue or work with Jean, our trafficker.
Eva (Pisier)? She’s a sex worker, or a spy who asks questions.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an assassin.”
“Oh, a professional?”
“No, an amateur. Semi-professional, actually.
All these interruptions, arrests and interrogations?
“Tests.”
Our brainstormers send Jean from hotel to hotel, into a nightclub or two, one with a bondage show, train stations to drawbridges to dry docks.
Yes, he picks up a bondage magazine for the train ride. Yes, he buys rope. Will that play into “the whore subplot?”
What turns him on?
“Rape. Any rape.”
“All right. But it’s more expensive!”
It’s all weird and witty, and yes, one could totally imagine a film coming to life in just this way — plot, characters, complications, “Chekhov’s gun,” sex and violence, titillation and tension trotted out, debated and worked-out and shoved into the script on a train ride.
No, it never adds up to much or much that makes a lot of sense.
“Trans-Europ-Express” is like that ’60s train ride, mainly interested in simply getting from point A to point B, with requisite plot complications, a black and white tour of Antwerp and the Gare du Nord, hand-held tracking shots (camera work is glimpsed) on foot and in rail cars, vigorously obvious editing and kinky jokes that were daring for their time and can still push several politically incorrect buttons along the way.
If you want to take a 100 minute course in thriller cliches and how to apply them (right down to the obligatory “strip club” scene), Robbe-Grillet summons you aboard and announces “Class is in session” the moment he says “We should set a film on a train like this.”
Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, bondage, sex work jokes
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marie-France Pisier, Christian Barbier,
Ivo Pauwels, Jérôme Lindon,
Catherine Robbe-Grillet and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. A Lux/Kino Lorber release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.
Running time: 1:45
A hitman redemption story with oodles of violence?
“John Wick” ish?
This one looks over the top. July 11, we find out if it delivers for the goods.
Kind of an “Equalizer” movie for the “Anonymous” era, “The Amateur” with Riz not Rami as the expert in things you need to be an expert in to get even.
Sam Worthington’s the heavy.
An August release.
On the run from the mob, on the lam from dirty cops.
Egerton’s a walking muscle for this one.
Aug. 1
Back in the olden days, a local archdiosce might appeal to the Vatican for a little help when it came to demonic possession of good Catholic folk in their care.
Before you could say “La plume de ma tante!” Max Von Sydow would fly in, or Russell Crowe would Vespa over dressed in black to go to war with Satan.
That’s not how they roll in the ROK. Korean exorcisms, as depicted in “The Priests” and now “Dark Nuns,” cover all the polytheistic bases — Catholocism, Buddhism and shamanism.
For the ten-years-later sequel to “Priests,” all the guys in cassocks and crucifixes are busy. So it’s up to a couple of “Dark Nuns” — one older, unordained and uncensored enough to be over this “s–t” — take up the cause of saving a boy from whatever demon in whichever of the “twelve manifestations” has moved in and turned the kid suicidal.
Director Hyeok-jae Kwon tries to match the sass, spookiness and tone of “The Priests” in a slog of a thriller that manages to be even longer and slower than the 2015 original film.
Song Hye-kyo of John Woo’s “The Crossing” movies stars as Sister Junia, stomping in with a five liter can of holy water and ready to kick ass by getting a demon to say its name.
She’s unfiltered and big on backtalk, to demons — “Coward! Taking over a child’s body!” — and to Catholic higher-ups, who as in many an exorcism movie including “The Priests” disapprove of having to “approve” this fighting-the-Devil dirty work. So they keep it at arm’s length.
Unordained or not, we’ll find you a priest to pitch in and you go, girl!
But Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook of “Squid Game”) runs the hospital where poor Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) is being unsuccessfully treated.
“Possessions are not real,” Paolo argues (in Korean with English subtitles). And God, he reminds Sister Junia, “exists solely in heaven.”
He won’t be much help unless he upends his disbelief. So his young protege Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-been) will have to join the cursing, smoking Junia on her quest.
They appeal to the Vatican for the priests from “The Priests” to come and help. No dice. St. Francis’s Bell from that first film? Maybe. “Saint Peter’s Keys?” You know, the ones on the tarot cards?
Yes, this script, like the first film’s, spends a staggering amount of screen time on arcane Catholic myth, tortured explanations of “why” Father Kim and Father Choi can’t be bothered to help this time (the actors got more famous) and Korean polytheistic work-arounds.
Tarot, shamanism, let’s throw the works at this demon and see if we can save this boy.
Both films have decent enough effects, but neither manages the existential dread that “The Exorcist” served up and few “exorcism” films since have come close to imitating in the 50 years since.
Both “The Priests” and “Dark Nuns” go for jokes, just not enough of them. Each story is driven by a maverick Catholic character who could have been a lot more fun to hang with and root for. But neither film gets enough out of that engaging central character.
All “Dark Nuns” manages to do is provide equal opportunity for disappointment.
Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity
Cast: Song Hye-kyo, Jeon Yeo-been, Lee Jin-wook, Huh Joon-ho and Moon Woo-jin.
Credits: Directed by Hyeok-jae Kwon, scripted by Hyo-jin Oh and Kim Woo-jin. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:54
An obsessive search for justice and closure consumes a Syrian on the hunt for an Assad regime war criminal in “Ghost Trail,” a quietly gripping thriller about Syrian expats in Europe pinning their hopes on “international justice” as they conspire to track down a torturer.
But is the trail cold? Is their quarry too careful and cunning? With “justice” imperiled all over the world, will they get what they’re looking for from others? Or will the tempation of simple revenge be too hard to resist?
Back home, our hunter was Hamid, a professor of literature in an Aleppo university imprisoned at Sednaya, released in the middle of desert by callous soldiers in the film’s grim opening. But in Strasbourg, France, he calls himself Amir. Or Saleh. Many names. He (Adam Bessa) does day labor in construction. But that’s just to get to know the crew so that’s he comfortable asking around.
“Have you seen” his cousin, he wants to know? He questions anybody who was ever in a refugee/resettlement camp, haunts the welcome conters and visits the Turkish quarter where some Syrian refugees settled. His photograph of the man he’s looking for is blurry. His vague questions earn mistrust. Escaping a murderous dictatorship leaves one and all paranoid.
When Yara (Hala Rajab) says that she knew someone who knew “Sami Hanna,” after she tests him by quoting Arabic literature. She goes so far as to flirt a little. He barely notices.
Hamid is on a mission, one that has him lying to his mother (Shafiqa El Till) in a Beirut refugee camp, lying to French authorities who insist he’s overstayed his welcome and should return to the country that accepted him — Germany. He will seek psychological counseling if that will prolong his stay.
Hamid is “sure” his quarry is here. He rebuffs doubts from the online first-person-shooter video where he and his co-conspirators chat. He takes the money from his French go-between (Julia Franz Richter) in silent spy-game exchanges.
And when he spies someone who fits his profile, Hamid will not let anyone distract him from his prey or dissuade him that he’s got the wrong guy. It’s him, he tells his compatriots (in Arabic, French and German with English subtitles).
“I can sense it.”
He will stalk, eavesdrop and spend days and weeks looking for this college chemistry student (Tawfeek Barhom) to give himself away.
Bessa, of “Mosul” and “Extraction,” internalizes everything about Hamid, an educated man driven by loss, grief and revenge to listen to the victims’ tapes and plumb the depths of his own trauma to see if he has a match.
Others speak of being covered with a hood, counting the steps their persecutor took and smelling the sweat, breath and cologne of this creep who beat, electric shocked and burned his victims with acid. What detail will be the one that confirms or denies that our obsessive, disturbed stalker has his man, or that he’s lost any ability to be objective and weigh facts?
Barhom’s performance has a caginess that leaves room for doubt. And Richter’s Nina lets down her guard long enough to show the wrenching emotions about her reasons for joining this search-and-expose-or-kill cell.
Director and co-writer Millet scrupulously avoids melodrama and he immerses us in Hamid’s isolation, in the life he’s lost and the future he abandons for this obsession, his desire to get that closure and perhaps give all that was taken away meaning.
We invest in this quest, put ourselves in this man’s shoes and wonder, like him, if “justice” is itself a ghost, if it’s even possible in a world where tyrants and their minions face no consequences for their crimes, even in alleged democracies.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Adam Bessa, Julia Franz Richter, Hala Rajab, Shafiqa El Till and Tawfeek Barhom
Credits: Directed by Jonathan Millet, scripted by Florence Rochat and Jonathan Millet. A Music Box Films release.
Running time: 1:48
Why, a Jazz Age scandal, of course.
The “Lady” Mary does what the rich folks did, and the common folks now do.
Sept.12.
Well Go USA is about to unleash the sequel to the Korean exorcism thriller “The Priests,” titled “Dark Nuns,” in North America. So they figured they’d put the original 2015 hit out there for people who want to catch.
Not a bad idea, as that film may be easy enough to follow, but writer-director Jang Jae-Hyun (“Exhuma”) so cluttered his narrative with so many characters and bits of back story that it’s hard to keep track of who is whom. It takes some adjustment to get into the “style” of storytelling.
Naming more than one character “Park” in a Korean film is just plain mean.
A prologue shows us that Italian priests have taken their shot at this one Korean case and failed. They got the demon out, tucked it under one priest’s cassock for disposal (all becomes clear in the third act) and didn’t get it across the finish line.
One maverick Korean priest (Kim Yoon-seok of “Escape from Mogadishu”) has plunged into the case of the teen girl (Park So-dam of “Parasite”) and failed. Her allegations of “touching” were an added difficulty, with what the world knows about priests and this particular demon knowing what accusation to make.
Other priests and deacons have come and gone as this child’s possession keeps her in a coma between exorcisms. But they all took notes and recorded cassette tapes of their efforts.
Young, eager and perhaps troubled Deacon Choi (Gang Don-won of ““Peninsula”) is the latest recruit, summoned and cajoled by a church heirarchy trying to keep this entire enterprise off the books and out of the news.
Tactless, jaded Kim isn’t impressed by the new guy.
“You look like a Mormon,” he mutters (in Korean with English subtitles). “Idiot” becomes his nickname for the young guy, who starts to see things the moment he looks into the case and long before he meets the victim. That makes him qualified for the work.
The novelties of this 2015 film are its droll, sarcastic humor and the distinctly Eastern touches added to all the vomiting/bed-levitating tropes of the genre. A little Buddhism and a sprinkling of shamanism and the like suggest that the Civilized East has been dealing with these devils since before the Vatican, William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin got involved.
Demons are typically lions, snakes or scorpions and can’t be destroyed. The best you can hope for is to trap them in another animal’s body and toss them in a river “at least 15 meters wide.”
Yeah, they’re damned specific, or so Father Kim says as he has Deacon Choi ring a bell made by the founder of their order, St. Francis of Asisi as part of the ritual.
Kim is sanguine about what it will take to defeat this “5,000 year old bastard,” and Choi’s stomach, spine and will shall be tested in the battle. Is he up to it?
The film begins in gloom and mystery, drifts around interminably in the middle acts as earlier priests and deacons are discussed and even revisited, men terminally changed by their battle with The Beast.
Church politics further muddy up the narrative, not adding anything to it, just slowing the movie to a crawl.
But if you’re going to see one Korean exorcism thriller this year, you can’t make it “Dark Nuns.” Not without catching “The Priests” first, and not without wading through a lot of distractions that keep us from focusing on our leads and their quest to save a teenager from a demon who has to be convinced to “say his name.”
Rating: unrated, Satanic violence
Cast: Kim Yoon-seok, Gang Don-won, Park So-dam and
Lee Ho-jae
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jang Jae-Hyun. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:47
Movie Nation 