The Wrap reports that this is a record. A lot of shots were taken at elusive (mostly) kiddie audience this year.
That Oscar category is usually a three film field of nominees, so 29 movies — probably including “Addams Family,” and a list that should certainly include the middling “Abominable” (Will they tick off China by leaving it out?) — will be left out. https://t.co/hG2EsFn4DS https://twitter.com/TheWrap/status/1184519527599489024?s=17
When the snowball was first forming on the ever-swelling avalanche that began as “The Trump/Russia Investigation,” the increasingly embattled 45th president was quoted making this plea from inside the White House.
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
He was elected, apparently with massive foreign intervention, by millions of Americans who should have remembered that name and been instinctively repulsed by Donald Trump’s “protege” association with the most dishonest, corrupt and repellant figure in American politics, “America’s Machiavelli,” a man whose evil took on Bond villain proportions.
The name “Roy Cohn” inspired fear and revulsion during his lifetime, and provided the perfect self-loathing monster in the epoch-defining Broadway show “Angels in America.” He was that infamous.
But here’s a documentary for the millions who didn’t get the name or the association. Documentarian Matt Tyrnauer (“Studio 54,” “Valentino: The Last Emperor”) finds another gay subject to profile in this portrait of a man whose very proximity let you know, one witness in the film declares, “you were in the presence of evil.”
Tyrnauer’s thorough rummage through Roy M. Cohn’s life and the damage he left in his wake is built on interviews he did from an early age. He was a high profile Justice Department lawyer interviewed on an ocean liner in 1951, at age 23. He’s seen bantering on chat shows over the decades, swapping shots with novelist and wit Gore Vidal (who was ONTO him, and witheringly so) all the way to his bitter — and one cannot stress that word enough, BITTER — end-of-life chat with Larry King.
The cornerstone interview featured here is with journalist Ken Auletta, whose 1970s Esquire Magazine profile of Cohn the reporter recorded. The tapes capture Cohn’s dissembling, counter-attacking style, a man described by family as a classic “self-hating Jew” who only gets rattled when Auletta brings up the open secret of Cohn’s life — that he was also a self-loathing homosexual.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” traces Cohn’s birth, into a wealthy family whose father was essentially bribed to marry “the ugliest girl in the Bronx.” An only child and a homely one whose parents never let him forget that, he carried secret and not-so-secret shames and a very public chip on his shoulder out of that wealth and into the walls of power.
A relative relates how he committed his first bribe at 15, finished law school too young to yet take the bar, learned how to bully from his corrupt family and how to play the demagogue once he hooked up with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose media-grabbing lies, tirades and attacks gave a name to an entire era.
There is history here that even those who remember Cohn and his lying, thieving, mob-connected legacy (he was finally disbarred late in life) might have forgotten. Cohn’s first public work was his involvement in the Rosenberg spy case, and he took credit for getting (in phone calls he claims he had with the judge) atomic-secret stealing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg the electric chair. Tyrnauer’s witnesses suggest Cohn and Judge Irving Kaufman, both Jewish like the Rosenbergs, pushed for execution to prove their own loyalty to America.
His time as McCarthy’s “handmaiden” — whispering in the senator’s ear during Senate hearings McCarthy lorded over — is recounted, as is the senator’s fall. The end of McCarthy and the tipping point of the entire McCarthy Era, which had succeeded in putting Eisenhower in the White House, came because of Cohn’s secret sexuality and his willingness to use power unscrupulously.
He tried to get a favor for a handsome colleague he had a crush on, a fellow McCarthy staffer who had just been drafted. The “Army-McCarthy Hearings” spun out of Cohn’s eagerness to deliver special treatment and placement of his “special friend,” G. David Schine.
We’re shown clips of hearings pierced with laughter about “pixies” and “fairies.”
Yes, it took nationally-televised gay bashing to end the amoral, self-destructive witch hunt of McCarthyism. Didn’t see that in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” did you?
As a person and as a lawyer, he “never played by the rule book,” one and all agree. There was his underhanded way of taking over the extended family’s most famous property, the Lionel Trains toy company (“which he ran into the ground”), the mysterious fire that sank his heavily-insured motor yacht “Defiance” and killed a young crewman, and the death’s door-bedside visit with a “client” wangling a signature that made him executor of an estate, the final straw crime in a career littered with them that led to his disbarment and undoing.
“Amoral” is one of those words, like “cutthroat” and “ruthless,” that Cohn relished having attached to his name. And the implication is, these are all ways of lying, living and operating that he passed on to his star protege and sometime client, Donald J. Trump.
Cultivate the press with gossip and favors, “wrap yourself in the flag.” “Never apologize, never admit defeat, or that you’ve lost, never leave a paper trail,” don’t be shy about endlessly repeating the same lies, always “attack” so that you control what the conversation is about (changing the subject), avoid taxes to the point where you “die owing the IRS a fortune,” and if “they’re on to you,” “rat out other people.”
Sound familiar? In the month since this documentary went into limited release, it’s proven prophetic about events as crimes are alleged or revealed in Washington. “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” even seems to predict how the tidal wave of high crimes and misdemeanors might play out.
The end game for Roy M. Cohn, who died in 1986, makes it all seem too familiar.
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic content, some sexual material and violent images
Cast: Roy Cohn, Ken Auletta, Liz Smith, Gore Vidal, Larry King, etc.
Credits: Directed by Matt Tyrnauer. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:37
Paramount has picked this up, and the casting alone just tickles me no end.
Via The Hollywood Reporter.
@johnkrasinski & Ryan Reynolds (aka @VancityReynolds).
John Krasinski will write, direct, produce & star, Reynolds to co-star in “Imaginary Friends.” https://t.co/xXlNnJisa2 https://twitter.com/Borys_Kit/status/1184246092637954048?s=17
The most violent movie since “Joker?”
That would be “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” a Disney fantasy allegedly for children, but a sure way to scare tinier tykes into premature therapy. Because even the Joker didn’t lock pixies and fairies in a church and…
Never mind.
Featuring production design, costumes, makeup and effects that would turn J.R.R. Tolkien, or at least Peter Jackson, green with envy, it’s built on a story borrowed from every lazy fantasy typist since Tolkien and C.S. Lewis — “WAR! Between the magic folk, the fairies, Valkyries (called “Fays” here), woodland sprites and humans!”
The mayhem promises genocide, chemical weapons and Michelle Pfeiffer taking on Angelina Jolie, even though Jolie’s title character is reduced to a glorified, winged cadaver of a supporting player in this sequel.
Where’s the wit of the first film, an upside-down take on “Sleeping Beauty” where the “Evil Queen” got a bum rap?
“He’s very kind,” Maleficent is told of her goddaughter’s suitor.
“Kind of what?”
Maleficent is counseled to smile, “Show a little less fang” when she meets the humans who gave her that bad reputation. Well, comedy was never the Oscar winning Jolie’s forte.
The story, about the human Kingdom of Ulstead making peace with and “joining” the creature Kingdom of the Moors via marriage, is built on a romance that lacketh spark or warmth. Elle Fanning’s Queen Aurora smiles and smooches on Prince Phillip (Harris Dickinson), but they won’t make anybody forget “The Princess Bride.” Or even its many inferior imitations.
Pfeiffer is the obviously-scheming Ulstead queen who baits her future in-law over dinner, brings down the wrath of Maleficent and triggers a war.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is a fellow winged-one, a genetic relative of Maleficent’s “Descended from the Phoenix” folk.
Warwick Davis, required casting for ALL fantasy films, plays an alchemist who carries out deathly experiments on fairies.
The script forces director Joachim Rønning to overwhelm the screen with forest and swamp creatures, although thankfully, we don’t pause to admire and identify these “fantastic beasts. The damned movie would be a Potter-length four hours long if that happened.
You’ll recognize Juno Temple and Imelda Stanton in fairy form, with all manner of snout-nosed frog-pigs, tree creatures EXACTLY like the “Ents” of “Lord of the Rings,” glowing flowers a la “Avatar,” all packed into a digital dreamscape of gardens and streams, castles and a aeries.
It’s impressive for a minute or three. But “Maleficent” could make you long for the days when folklorists like old friends Tolkien and Lewis spent lifetimes studying legends, myths and folk tales before building their own.
“Maleficent” sounds, looks and feels as if it was contrived out of an algorithm, a heartless commodity formed from other heartless commodities.
The endless on-and-on-it-goes finale grasps for emotions it only earns by being so very appalling in the build up to it.
One doesn’t feel redeemed or revived after enduring this “Maleficent. Just relief.
MPAA Rating: PG for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and brief scary images
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Michelle Pfeiffer, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ed Skrein and Robert Lindsay.
Credits: Directed by Joachim Rønning, script by Linda Woolverton, Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. A Walt Disney release.
Running time: 1:58
This has a lot of promise, even though Lionsgate is sort of still a “poverty row” (horror and cheese) distributing studio.
They’ve got Oscar winners Charlize Theron (as Megan Kelly), Nicole Kidman (as Gretchen Carlson). They’ve got Margot Robbie and Kate McKinnon.
And as Roger Ailes, the sexually harassing Evil Genius in Chief? John Lithgow in lots of makeup.
December.
Is there a house style to Spanish horror films, a common thread that they share?
There’ve been so many, covering every genre, it’s a wonder they don’t have their own nomenclature, like “J-Horror” (Japanese), K-Horror” (Korean) and the like. A simple translation will have to do — Horror Español.
Yes, if the movie’s dull enough, your mind wanders to such arcana. Mine does, anyway.
The one thing the ghost stories, zombie tales, vampire thrillers and witchcraft cinema of Spain have in common? Design. They’re all about the gloom, almost all set in gloomy old houses in an ancient country where “gloom” isn’t the rule. Sunshine is.
“The Influence” is as gloomy as any of them — well, not “The Orphanage,” “The Others” or “The Devil’s Backbone” — even if there isn’t all that much that’s new or novel in it. It’s about two daughters struggling to cope with the end-of-life instructions of their mother. She (Emma Suárez) may be in a coma, with her “living will” ordering her nurse and daughters to keep her alive, no matter matter. But Alicia (Manuela Vellés), the nurse-daughter who has returned to help, remembers she was a witch. Alicia even told her husband (Alain Hernández).
It’s just that sister Sara (Maggie Civantos) can’t manage the inert, evil crone on her own.
Childhood flashbacks recount the trauma of their childhood, something Sara seems to have pushed back into her memory. Alicia? She’s annoyed at being here, enraged at “everything she did to us,” at her mother’s family for allowing this long-ago abuse to happen. But Alicia is strapped for cash because electrician jobs for husband Mikel are hard to come by in this corner of coastal Spain. They are as trapped as Sara has been.
And then the old woman on life support upstairs starts making a play for Alicia’s ten year old daughter, Nora (Claudia Placer).
“Mum wants Nora to stand in front of the mirror,” Sara guesses (in Spanish, with English subtitles). Which mirror?
“THAT mirror.”
The effects or “gimmicks” here include trapping Nora in granny’s room where objects rise from shelves and attack her, another room filled with talismans, ritual objects, magic books and the like, including a deer’s skull and antlers and particularly potent locket.
Nora takes the rage she’s absorbing at home with her to her new school. “Acting out” creates a body count.
You know. The usual.
Mother Alicia and Daddy Mikel will do what they can to protect. Auntie Sara? We’ll see.
First-time feature director Denis Rovira van Boekholt throws a lot of gruesome stuff at us in this adaptation of a Ramsey Campbell novel. Is any of it scary? Not so much.
There’s little mystery in play when everybody seems to know Victoria was and is a witch, even if they’ve chosen to forget or ignore the evidence her kids witnessed long ago.
The tropes of the genre demand a lot of spooky rooms and a cellar to get lost in and mother-daughter bonds that will be tested across generations.
If you think you can guess what happens, you’re probably right. If you think you know who lives until the closing credits, you’re dead on the money.
MPAA Rating: TV:MA, graphic violence, some sexuality
Cast: Manuela Vellés, Maggie Civantos, Alain Hernández, Claudia Placer and Emma Suárez
Credits: Directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt, script by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech and Denis Rovira van Boekholt, based on a Ramsey Campbell novel. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:39
The building blocks of a really good heist picture are in place in writer-director Corey Stanton’s “Robbery,” an indie thriller from The Great White North.
There’s an old ex-con suffering from dementia, played by respected character actor Art Hindle, whose credits go back to 1980’s “Porky’s” and 1974’s “Black Christmas.”
His kid, Richie (Jeremy Ferdman, a younger Aaron Paul) is a clumsy newcomer to stocking-cap capers. He’s interested in learning.
“The only reason I’m here is you’ve got fifty years of serious experience floating aroind that dying brain’a yours!”
There’s a female crime boss (Jennifer Dale) in this “lawless, Godless” corner of rural Canada. And she’s not to be trifled with.
“You have sticky fingers. I need to take them.”
The dialogue is hard-boiled and spot-on.
“Sometimes,” a stolen goods “fence” (Andy Morgan) lectures naive young Richie, “the price of poverty is a conscience.”
And there are twists and double-crosses aplenty, a couple of doozies that flip the script in the third act.
The cast isn’t bad. The fact that “Robbery” doesn’t pay points more to editing tweaks (it lacks suspense, first frame to last) and script-workshopping than any single fundamental flaw. Sell this to a major studio and the remake could be gold.
Frank (Hindle) is introduced in a doctor’s office, stumbling through mental acuity tests. His dementia has taken away his short term memory.
“Who ARE you?”
But he has a decent handle on the past. That’s why Richie is taking care of him, shoplifting and holding up the occasional convenience store to keep Frank fed and gas in their battered 1980 Chevy Malibu.
The “past” is one clue about this relationship. Frank and his late partner used to steal big — art, jewelry, cash. The “meeting” is another. Richie has a gambling addiction, but at least you meet the nicest people there. Winona (Sera-Lys McArthur) is a Native American bartender at the local casino.
Might she have the $50,000 Richie needs to keep the hoodlums who keep showing up at the garage where he works, making throat-slitting and trigger-pulling gestures to his face?
His coming-on-strong boss (Tara Spencer-Nairn) sure hopes so.
The heists Richie enlists his father’s advice about are routine and inept. He’s grabbing electric toothbrushes and the like. He needs a lecture from the fence. Writer-director Stanton makes the thefts so dull you wish he’d spent months watching how such sequences are put together in classics of the genre.
Not that “Robbery” is really about the work. Clock ticking down on Richie, the rising level of threats (that “take” his “fingers” bit), the need for cash and the places they might find it, the complications of all these peripheral characters, all take a back seat to Frank’s memory, which comes and goes, and Richie’s relationship to it and reliance upon it.
When you’re leaving Post-It notes on the steering wheel so that your demented get-away driver remembers who you are, you’re up against it. Richie quizzes Frank to keep his mind as sharp as it’s going to get, Frank keeps quizzing Richie on what to grab once he’s gotten in the door.
Neither inspires much confidence.
The whole affair veers into one “surprise” topping the next one in the third act, when compact simplicity would have better served the picture. The twists are all headed towards the inevitable, so what’s their point, anyway?
“Robbery” feels like a solid, promising first draft of a pretty good heist picture. A good agent could shop this one around, get the right aging star’s attention, and produce a remake that works. The generic, forgettable title is just one reason no one will remember “Robbery” after that happens.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Art Hindle, Jeremy Ferdman, Sera-Lys McArthur, Jennifer Dale and Tara Spencer-Nairn and Andy McQueen
Credits: Written and directed by Corey Stanton. An Indiecan Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:33
“Lucy in the Sky” is a Lifetime Original Movie-style melodrama puffed up into a would-be “Gravity,” a “serious” movie with the weight of an Oscar contender.
It’s been over-thought, over-scripted and over-directed into something spacey, ethereal and trippy by the guy who gave us TV’s “Legion.”
He gets so caught up in impressing us he loses track that he’s losing us with his tedious tale of NASA, the mental pitfalls of spaceflight, sex and competition.
You get why director and co-writer Noah Hawley did it. The true story that “Lucy in the Sky” jumps off from is lowdown, common — almost sordid. And tragically funny.
This is a highly-fictionalized version of the love triangle with the astronaut who flipped out and went on a cross-country dash to commit a kidnapping — wearing adult diapers to save time. The overreach here is trying to explain how “touching the void” plays on the mind of those recruited for job. The real story is a lot harder to see in a woman-experiences-the-limitless-cosmos-first-hand-and-snaps terms.
Hawley wanted to make a movie with Oscar winners, with Natalie Portman — who won every honor under the sun as a warped ballerina in “Black Swan” — competing with rising star Zazie Beetz (“Joker”) for the attentions of “a divorced action figure who likes to go fast” astronaut (Jon Hamm), and also competing for spots in the spaceflight rotation because Lucy (Portman) has spacewalked and “changed.”
He wanted the overwhelmed astronaut’s name to be “Lucy,” so it could be a play on the Beatles tune, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
He REALLY wanted to use drones for all sorts of overhead shots, mimicking the perspective of things seen from “above,” in the heavens. He wanted soft focus scenes capturing Lucy’s increasingly fragile mental state.
And he wanted to take his sweet time getting around to that epic cross-country quest, a Houston to San Diego run, rather than the real-life dash to Orlando — which is inherently funny.
Lucy Cola (Portman) is a brassy, on-task Texan, “a winner” who experiences rapture when she spacewalks on a mission to the International Space Station. “Best two weeks of mah lahff,” she drawls.
She doesn’t want platitudes from her boss, barely hears “I missed you” from her not-particularly-butch husband (Dan Stevens of “Legion,” more in wussy “Downton Abbey” guise here). She’s not concerned about the NASA shrink’s (Nick Offerman) concerns.
“I never felt so alive.”
All she wants, and as soon as possible, is to go back. The Shuttle is winding down, Orion is still down the road. She’s frantically training and lobbying, in a manic hurry for something that won’t happen overnight.
The one guy who gets it is Astronaut Mark (Hamm), who gives her his “You’ve seen everything, the whole universe…seen the face of God” bit, welcoming her into “the circle of the rolling ball,” the exclusive club of humans who have traveled in space.
He’s hitting on her. And in her space-drunk state, she lets him.
Her hard-drinking, hard-cursing Nana (Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn) made her tough and drove her to compete. So when her spot in the flight line is threatened and her affair means more to her than the swinging “action figure,” the woman who lives for checklists, planning, rattling through spacesuit prep and mission prep lists as she jogs, tumbles into another plan, another mission.
Portman makes a more convincing ballerina than astronaut. Space suits make even the bulkiest of us look like sticks stuffed into a Michelin Man suit. But she’s such an interesting actress she makes you forget the petite sprite lined up with other NASA Type As.
The pairing with Hamm is similarly out of proportion. But Portman brings an intimidating intensity to Lucy that makes him shrink in her presence in the later sccenes.
“I’m Good. A-OK. All systems are GO!”
Never has “The Right Stuff” seemed so wrong.
Hawley overwhelms the movie as the story takes on clutter it doesn’t need, and that includes extraneous characters. And I could have done with a lot fewer overhead views. Lucy’s fascination with butterflies coming out of their crysalis is a metaphor that doesn’t neatly fit here.
But the funereal pacing suggests they were sure they had a movie of weight and awards season importance on their hands. On the page, the whole package probably looked that way.
Save for the TV show runner ham-handedly over-directing it all.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Tig Notaro and Elle Burstyn.
Credits: Directed by Noah Hawley, script by Elliott DiGuiseppi, Brian C. Brown and Noah Hawley. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 2:04
Seems a tad on the nose, which is why many of us thought, “ure. I can totally see that.” She can be scary, although action is outside her normal range.
Via Variety
Zoe Kravitz to Play Catwoman in ‘The Batman’ https://t.co/iN4jfw5yzu https://t.co/Hw1b0vyfNb https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1183852111630495744?s=17
The statistics are shocking.
In the decades of commitment to the “War on Terror,” millions have served, and a whopping twenty percent of those who have say they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the experience.
Twenty-two veterans a day kill themselves.
One image in the new documentary “From Shock to Awe” sums this disaster up just a few seconds of screen time. Army veteran Matt Kahl shows us his double-sized bathroom medicine cabinet, stuffed to the gills with prescriptions.
“Everything in this cabinet right here almost killed me, multiple times,” he says. He’s attempted suicide, and of course, he’s not alone. The horrors of what many lived through and witnessed is devouring a generation of patriotic young men and women who volunteered for service.
What can be done for them? Because whatever the VA and the medical/pharmaceutical establishment are trying is failing.
As a piece of advocacy filmmaking and movie rhetoric, “From Shock to Awe” takes its sweet time getting to its “solution step,” which we’ve seen teased in the opening scene. Bearded, tattooed veterans gather around a fire pit, being served “the medicine” and wished a pleasant “journey” by a top-knotted shaman, or priest and drug-trip tour guide.
The answer for many of these men, apparently, is the Amazonian herbal tea mental and digestive purgative known as Ayahuasca.
“Shock to Awe” takes us into the shaky lives of Matt and Aimee (his wife) Kahl, the flashbacks (illustrated with combat footage of Matt and others), and Michael and Brooke Cooley (both traumatized veterans), Coloradans struggling to get back to square one years after their tours of duty ended.
Michael lets filmmaker Luc Côté (“Four Days Inside Guantanemo”) ride with him to school at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, and we hear the myriad things that trigger panic attacks in this former MP. Cities, with rooftops which he used to scan for snipers, traffic jams where any tailgater is a potential convoy ambush tend to freak him out.
Loud noises, flashes of light in the dark, the veterans here — and the sample Luc Côté documented is VERY small — share triggers and after-effects, struggling to keep marriages and families together in the face of an illness that has almost killed them and is killing a score of their comrades in arms every day.
All that changes when the PTSD victims travel to Orlando. It’s not the magic of a theme park they seek, but the faddish “miracle” enlightenment cure-all of the moment, administered in a safe space (out of doors) provided by Soul Quest, led by the top-knotted Ayuhuasca expert Chris Young.
“Feel the medicine,” Young, of the Ayuhuasca Church of the Mother Earth, counsels. You will feel “connected to everything,” he says, coaching them and basically providing the language they will use to describe their experiences later.
And in these two cases (Matt and Michael), the hallucinatory tea seems to work. You would hope, even in our seriously retrograde times, that this substance and this “cure” would undergo rigorous study as psychotherapy tries new drugs to use in conjunction with therapy. Some of that is happening, although not that we see this in the film.
Anything to stem to flood of suicides, right?
But Côté’s film screams out for words like “cure” and “medicine” to be slapped in quotation marks. There is not only no contrary voice here, no skeptic suggesting that maybe this is just this year’s LSD substitute and PTSD victims are merely switching one dependency for another.
No academics or scientists appear, pro or con. Like other Ayuhuasca documentaries I’ve reviewed, there’s a built-in credulity that spending too much time thinking about the self-annointed “expert” we see here invites. It’s not wrong, no matter what anecdotal evidence the film provides, to question where dude went to shaman school.
The alternative is spelled out on Brooke Cooley’s t-shirt in an early scene. “Cannabis cures cancer. Google it!” Maybe it does, but “Google” isn’t proving that, any more than a couple of veterans who ask for multiple ayahuasca trips to calm their anxiety — and that treatment seeming to work — proves the thesis of “From Shock to Awe.”
We can collectively recognize the crisis, urge the study and testing for therapeutic value and do it in all haste, realizing how desperate suffering people are for some relief.
Limiting your arguement to a couple of guys tripping around a fire in Orlando isn’t making your, even if it makes that sale.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug use, profanity, accounts of violence
Cast:Mike Cooley, Brooke Cooley, Matt Kahl and Aimee Kahl, Chris Young
Credits: Directed by Luc Côté. An Adobe International release.
Running time: 1:27
