Movie Nation

I interviewed him when one of his “Friday” comedies came out, a grand old man of comedy, even then.

John Witherspoon was a comic of the chitlin’ circuit era who found off color laughs in the stoner comedies of the recent past.

He was 77.

Hollywood Reporter (@THR) Tweeted:
Ice Cube (@icecube), Regina King (@ReginaKing) and Marlon Wayans (@MarlonWayans) also shared memories and kind words on social media in the wake of John Witherspoon’s death https://t.co/Zj99L8nTi6 https://twitter.com/THR/status/1189571937435041792?s=17

If the Chinese government isn’t careful, the world will give Liu Ximei the Nobel Peace Prize.

And if there’s one thing the Hollywood and NBA-coddling one-party dictatorship hates, it’s having another version of its greed, incompetence, repression and aggression exposed to the world.

“Ximei” is about a genuine social justice warrior fighting the lonely fight on behalf of  AIDS patients in China. Liu Ximei is one of them, and the documentary “Ximei” recounts how she was infected, how society and her own family treated her and how the sunglasses-wearing thugs of the “People’s Republic” keep coming down on her for speaking out, garnering attention and demanding justice.

She and millions of Chinese like her are victims of China’s “Black Blood Economy.” A peasant in a nation that rarely acknowledges it has them, she was gruesomely injured doing farm work — at age 10 — in Xinoa County, Henan Provice.

But “child labor” wasn’t the worst of it. While in the hospital, she can given a transfusion of hospital-provided and sold HIV positive blood. For years, China callously and carelessly exploited peasants, getting them to sell their blood. They didn’t bother to test it until much later. They didn’t bother to keep the blood gathering and dispensing gear disinfected. AIDS exploded in Henan Province.

Ximei contracted it, and in a culture built on family, she became a prime example of the shunning families did to members who contracted the disease. She shows us the hospital where she grew up, living for eight years with no family or friends, with only reluctant staff and animals that roamed the courtyard for company.

In “Ximei,” we follow her as she visits other victims, old farm women, younger women like herself.

“Have some pig feet soup,” they insist.

She leads the film crew into the chaos of “clinic day” in town, where medicine that these patients need to survive is delivered and sold. Everybody asks her advice, even as they’re getting the same drugs she needs, even as they’re facing the same impossible bills for a deadly disease official policy and cutthroat shortcuts gave them.

There’s supposed to be government reimbursement (the LEAST they could do) for this massive, shadowy government screw-up. But the bureaucracy demands that patients prove it was their fault, and bury illiterate peasants under paperwork that would qualify them.

Ximei and her friends talk about this, as she visits them in their homes or in the house in town where she provides food and shelter to those coming into town for treatment.

With a mop-top (possibly a wig) and pronounced limp due to her long-ago accident, Ximei is a local celebrity.

“Everybody knows the AIDS girl who can’t walk properly,” she says (in Chinese, with English subtitles). And that’s the other burden she must carry. Hand-weaving plastic AIDS ribbons is one thing. Being summoned to international conferences for consultation, and followed by a film crew is an altogether different thing.

We see her stroll past a Chinese-hosted health and justice event past government sanctioned posters (in English) decrying the state of women’s rights and ecological rights — in India.

The cops and hired thugs who rough her up and take her phone? Just the Chinese making sure the focus is on India’s scandals, and not those of the People’s Paradise.

Ximei makes a quietly compelling heroine, and the filmmakers — who can be seen questioning the men in sunglasses following her around — do her their greatest service in just letting her tell her story, just letting their camera capture the indifference, fear and fury that has been officialdom’s knee-jerk reaction to her cause.

But I don’t know. She’s just one woman and it’s just one documentary, even if it a pretty good one with limited prospects for release. Ximei still looks like one of those solitary heroes who doggedly lead by example until others help her move mountains.

And those others just might live in Sweden.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Liu Ximei, Liu Min

Credits: Written and directed by Andy Cohen and Gaylen Ross. An AC Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Totally down with putting the fate of mankind in the hands of womankind in the “Terminator” franchise.

Giving your movie some immigration debate relevance, a little election debate currency in a workplace where machines are taking away jobs? Savvy.

It’s great to see Linda Hamilton as bacon screen as Sarah again. And turning Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 killing machine into a cuddly, white-bearded savior? Alrighty then.

But the sequel built on those components, “Terminator: Dark Fate” turns into the most ridiculous, recycled and repetitive film of the franchise. Two tedious hours covering ground we’ve been over and over and OVER again in these damned films, with digital parkour chases and digital MMA/anything goes brawls and just enough “improvements” in the effects to suggest this isn’t the exact same movie we’ve seen several times before.

The molten metal morphing version of this latest mechanical killer from the future (Gabriel Luna) is black, and not chromium. So yeah, drop what you’re doing because, wow, this is um, different.

Tim Miller of “Deadpool” directed the film, and it staggers, straight out of the gate. We’re treated to a the fate of John Connor (Edward Furlong, digitized) and his mom Sarah, their best efforts to head off “Judgement Day” of 1998 be damned.

“I stopped it,” Sarah narrates. “Saved three billion lives. You’re welcome.” As if.

Human extinction at the hands of Skynet was foiled. But something else went wrong. Time-travel spheres from the future are popping up in Mexico City, depositing their travelers as naked as ever.

One of them is this new and improved hunter-killer (Luna). Another sphere drops the swan-necked/model-thin blonde “super-soldier from the future” Grace (Mackenzie Davis), here to foil the Rev-9, as the new machine is called.

This time, the woman to be protected is a bilingual Mexican auto worker, Danielle (Natalia Reyes). She’s barely made it to the auto plant where she works when it’s under assault. And Grace is there with this not-the-least-bit-pithy one-liner.

“Come with me or you’re dead in the next 30 seconds.”

Two big-name screenwriters (and a third dude) and this was their best shot?

“Dark Fate” eventually lets Grace tell us who she is, an “augmented” Six Million Dollar woman from the future. She’s here to save Dani from a machine she can’t stop.

Fortunately, Sarah Connor is still roaming the Southwest, north and south of the border, packing heat. Hamilton, who still can carry off “bad ass,” but whose acting seems soap opera rusty in the early scenes, gets a real “star entrance” here, arriving with a deadpan sneer and a bang.

“I’ll be back.”

Now Dani’s got two protectors. And it’s just not enough.

Miller lets his film settle for big, dumb digital brawls — half a dozen of them, each more dizzying than the last — over character development. The picture grasps for tepid Arnold jokes about Texas, explanations about how his machine ended up with a family (not how he aged), and generic, half-assed Schwarzenegger gun fetishizing, a feature of the weightlifter’s action movies since the ’80s.

It all plays as points on a sliding scale of ridiculousness.

Davis and Luna are OK in the effects fights, but lack the charisma of Hamilton at her best and Robert Patrick’s Aryan-eyed menace as the molten chromium terminator upgrade.

Reyes, still newish to English language acting, is uninspiring playing a character who makes little sense, logically or chronologically.

And that leaves the picture to the AARP couple, who can’t bring anything new to their relationship, their rivalry or the banter.

What, no “Come mitt me iff you vant to liff?”

I had high hopes for this. The trailers really play up the sentimental tug of bringing Hamilton back on the payroll.

But damn, “Dark Fate” is dull.

MPAA Rating: R for violence throughout, language and brief nudity |

Cast: Linda Hamilton, MacKenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gabriel Luna

Credits: Directed by Tim Miller, script by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes. Billy Ray. A Paramount/Fox release.

Running time: 2:08

This abortive effort to sell the 1970s horror classic to movie fans never made it into theaters. It’s arty and horrific, images popping on the screen that play like Friedkin’s thriller’s greatest scariest hits.

The guard is changing for filmmakers we have treated as “brand names” for years.

Which is why the director of the indie horror pic, “It Comes at Night,” sort of “The Quiet Place” only Australian and somewhat less creepy, is getting billed as “acclaimed director Trey Edward Shults.”

Same thing happened with that TV guy who made “Lucy in the Sky.” Yes, studio marketing people are billing these films by filmmakers of little to no renown — Noah Hawley, looking at YOU — as auteurist events.

“Waves” is another South Florida coming-of-age-as-an-African-American” tale, is over two hours long and has some heavy blurbs from critics who have caught it in film festivals.

And even though Trey Edward Shults doesn’t roll off the tongue like “a Martin Scorsese Picture” or “A Spike Lee Joint” or “a film by Kathryn Bigelow” or “Taika Waititi” or John Woo” or whoever, perhaps he’ll be the marquee name director that they all do, even if we’ve passed the golden age of the auteur.

What’d the ol’ball coach tell us? All the ol’ball coaches?

“Play through the whistle,” he’d say. “Play through ‘The Last Whistle.’”

“The Last Whistle” is a lukewarm Texas melodrama that lets your parse that phrase and ethos. Exert yourself to the maximum, even past the point where the referee has blown the play dead. “Leave it all on the field.”

When the weather’s hot, that athletic bromide takes on sinister tones.

“Last Whistle” is about a veteran Texas high school football coach pushing his boys to the limit in his effort to achieve that undefeated season.

“I can feel it,” Coach Vic (Brad Leland) growls. And an instant later, his real motivation rears its head.

“Think I’ll get that offer?” he asks his assistant (Eric Nelson).

Coach Vic is awfully long in the tooth to be thinking about making that big NCAA leap. But there’s a whole lot “FOOTball” “The Last Whistle” throws at us that beggars belief.

Start with the movie’s half-speed version of on-field play, stripping the game of its velocity and violence, guys in the cleanest (and dullest designed) uniforms ever seen in the fourth quarter on natural grass.

That’s why most of “Last Whistle” is about Coach Vic’s struggles off the field. He’s got a rich kid (Tyler Perez) who thinks his big-donor daddy will arm-twist him some more playing time.

Star running back Benny (Fred Tolliver Jr.) is thinking about college, a kid whose mother (Deanne Lauvin) isn’t crazy about him wasting time on sports when he should be focusing on academics and the future they can give him.

The community lionizes him, but that’s because he’s winning. He lives alone, having run his wife off and estranged himself from his daughter. Hitting the local bar is his only means of unwinding, as he is feeling the heat from his might-be-my-replacement assistant.

When the rich kid peer-pressures Benny and a few others to dog it, showing up for practice, Coach thunders for “eleven GASSERS,” one brutal round of windsprints for every minute this quartet of slackers made everyone else wait. The assistant thinks that’s a bit much.

“Ah don’t CARE what you think!”

That puts a kid in an ambulance.

“Is he gonna be OK?” one player wonders as that ambulance departs.

“I don’t think so. Didn’t even turn the lights on.”

Football deaths are way down from their peak, we learn (as does Coach Vic) as the school board and the town rile themselves up to run the old coach off. The local press is all over him, as as his fellow barflies. His reaction is off-the-charts tone-deaf.

I mean, he’s got the season and his possible college job to think about!

The trial that comes when the mother of the dead player sues is laughably intimate, convenient and low-stakes.

And the story resolves itself in a way guaranteed to deliver eye-rolls.

Brad Leland plays the mayor of Nome in the new “Great Alaskan Race” feature film, a career character actor who does his best in this rare leading man role. He makes us feel neither pity nor revulsion for this callous man who has made his sport and his job his life.

Lauvin has the best scenes and best lines, a smart mother who sizes up the coach’s influence and promises to Benny with “So, you trust him? Everyone I ever worked with is a liar UNTIL they put it on paper!”

The world doesn’t need another movie or TV series about the Texas football obsession (Leland was in “Friday Night Lights,” too). It surely doesn’t need another African American athlete claiming “I ain’t smart like my mama” in search of a way out via athletics.

Pat the indie film production team on the back for trying, but even the varios faith-based films centered on high school football look more polished and realistic than this.

Whatever the ol’ball coaches say, it’s what Texans like to say that matters in movies of his genre.

“Go big, or go home.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and language

Cast: Brad Leland, Deanne Lauvin, Fred Tolliver Jr., Tyler Perez

Credits: Written and directed by Rob Smat. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:28

The writer director announced his comeback with “First Reformed” in 2017.

Now, the man who directed “Cat People” and “Light Sleeper” and “Afliction” and scripted “Taxi Driver” has Oscar Isaac to star in this gambling/vengeance drama.

Paul Schrader has a Willem Dafoe picture “Nine Men from Now” in the works as well.

From Variety

https://t.co/oiZ7Pv3QBB https://t.co/g1Hne3nfXW https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1189180855261917191?s=17

Nothing much happens in “Light from Light,” an East Tennessee character study bathed in mourning cloaked in quiet.

The lead characters meet because she’s an amateur ghost hunter, with lifelong intuitions, and he’s a grieving widower who wonders if his late wife is haunting the house she grew up in. But it’s not really about that. It still makes an interesting jumping-off point for a search for closure and new beginnings, none of which play out in conventional ways.

We hear Sheila’s story in a community radio interview. It started in childhood when “these dreams I had turned out to be prophetic” she says. Sheila, played by Marin Ireland (“Homeland,” “Hell or High Water”), is soft-spoken and unassuming. That makes her seem more credible.

What did she do with this “gift?”

“I had questions. Just questions.”

These days, she supports herself and her teen son (Josh Wiggins) running a rent-a-car counter at the Knoxville airport. But a priest (David Cale) heard the interview, and he approaches her. There’s a local man she might be able to help.

Jim Gaffigan plays Richard, a fish hatchery worker who would seem depressed even if he hadn’t added “haunted” to his demeanor. He’s wondering if these senses that someone’s been taking hold of his arm are the spirit of his late wife Susanne.

The question everybody around Sheila asks, and has to answer him or herself, is “Do you believe in ghosts?” Sheila’s lack of commitment to her own answer, and avoidance of the hard-sell are her best selling points. Sure, she’ll help — check out the remote old house where Susanne grew up when it’s good and dark.

What’ll this cost?

“I don’t charge. It just makes this more complicated.”

She just needs some sort of informal insurance waiver, because who knows what might happen? And she’ll need to rustle up some gear, and some help.

Sheila may be looking to give Richard some closure, but she’s plainly looking for a little herself. She’s no longer with “her group” of ghostbusters. She has to sit in on a paid seminar to get access the temperature probes and CCTV cameras for a night of ghost hunting.

Owen (Wiggins) and Lucy (Atheena Frizzell) are helping Sheila in her ghost hunt, and might be an item, prom dates even. But she’s about to head off to college, and he’s so ethical he asks “What’s the point?”

He’s following mom’s softly sold advice — “Don’t fall in love with sombody just because they treat you nice.”

Lucy and Owen’s mutual teenage concern is attraction, but he’s facing a circumscribed future, one he hasn’t worked out yet.

East Tennessee filmmaker Paul Harrill (“Something, Anything”) builds his film on soft-spoken conversations, quietly-voiced disagreements and — almost as an afterthought, suspense.

Are they actually going to encounter the supernatural?

Sheila’s methodical routine hangs on exploring the silence of the house by flashlight, and that’s as effective a scene-setter for ghostly encounters as anything the horror movie universe serves up, pretty much on a weekly basis.

“Is anyone here? If you’d like to communicate, let yourself be known.”

So polite.

Ireland’s understated performance, semi-skeptical, faintly credulous and luminescent with empathy, anchors “Light from Light.” It’s acting that teaches us not to expect too much, especially anything conventional.

It doesn’t take much for something to feel “extraordinary” under these conditions.

Gaffigan is mainly a reactor here, a hurting but thoughtful man who picks up a book after stocking a stream with trout.

No one so much as attempts an East Tennessee drawl, which I know well. Perhaps that “Winter’s Bone” touch would have made the ghost believing and ghost sensing subtexts quaint, Southern superstitions. But snippets of scenery aside, nothing grounds a movie in a place like accents.

“Light from Light” still feels like film firmly footed in reality, so much so that the few truly suspenseful moments seem almost epic in scope when they couldn’t be more intimate. It’s an exercise in tone and performance that rewards the viewer in ways you can’t quite articulate, but sense nevertheless.

Cast: Marin Ireland, Jim Gaffigan, Josh Wiggins, Atheena Frizzell.

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Harrill. A Grasshopper Film release.

Running time: 1:24

Remember that scene in “World War Z” where the zombies take on ant collectivist behavior and overwhelm the walls of Erezt Israel?

There’s such a moment in “Assimilate,” a C-grade thriller about “pod people” who are zombies in all but name. As the movie itself isn’t worth your trouble, let me save you the trouble and say that what I’m talking about is the unique way of upending the payoff in that remote farmhouse surrounded by zombies scenerio from “Night of the Living Dead,” and that it happens at the 55 minute mark.

It’s a lulu, and anybody planning their own zombie project should check it out and steal it. Because few are going to even bother Netflixing “Assimilate,” which again, isn’t a zombie movie.

We see the ants before the opening credits have ended. They’re swarming, sugar ant-sized critters getting on fruit and vegetables in the gardens of tiny Multon, Missouri.

That’s where two high school buds, Zach and Randy (Joel Courtney and Callum Worthy) live, a place they are desperate to escape. They document why on their new spy-cam Youtube series, “Welcome to Oblivion.”

It’s a place “too boring for crime,” but with these hidden lapel cameras, which the dorks turn up their lapels for (giving away the game) to score their “scoops,” they plan “to show the people of Multon the way they really are.”

They’ve barely started stirring up trouble when weird shrieks in the night and neighbors with strange bites start turning up. The bites magically heal, but those bitten take on the catatonic, humorless stare of pod people.

As the two gather video, they try to interest the deputy sheriff (Cam Gigandet) and the cute girl Zach (Or is it Randy?) fancies, Kayla (Andi Matichak).

One buys in, the other doesn’t. And as the shrieks spread, the conspiracy of local silence grows. Don’t fight it, “Assimilate” is the message of that silence.

Horror movies succeed or fail in a lot of ways, but the real Achilles heel of too many of them is in front of the camera. The actors don’t commit, don’t get across terror, panic, paranoia or rage.

That’s an issue here. As their family and friends are “replaced,” as new versions are spawned in the usual sci–fi/horror ways, frights are hard to come by, either on the screen or in the viewing of what’s on the screen. No character freaks out.

That would be the proper human reaction to witnessing something this horrific and extraordinary.

A little “Blair Witch” hand-held camera here, a manic chase by a nude replacement version of this or that member of the cast — probably the only “commitment” we sense in the performances — is all that livens up this seriously humdrum flick.

The dialogue is out of the “Lines you always hear in horror movies” book.

“What the hell WAS that?” “Either the entire town’s gone crazy, or WE have!” “You’re not my mom!”

None of it adds up to much. But if stream-it-you-must, feel free to jump ahead to that 55 minute mark. That’s a clever enough conceit to turn up in a better movie than “Assimilate.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, some nudity

Cast: Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy, Andi Matichak and Cam Gigandet

Credits: Directed by John Murlowski, script by John Murlowski and Steven Palmer Peterson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:33