Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin and a blast from your “Rockford Files” past, Gretchen Corbett co-star in this July 16 “Truffle Hunters” riff.
Kudos for getting this out so soon after the doc that was about dogs that seek the tasty fungi in France.
The Cage film is set in Oregon.
Zoe Lister Jones, Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen and Oscar winner Helen Hunt star in this deadpan “Last Day on Earth” comedy.
The burning question, carried over from each “Rogue Warfare” thriller to the next, is “Are they getting better?”
Is “Rogue Warfare: Death of a Nation,” the best yet?
The reasons the sequels exist are still here — cheap, desert southwest locations, surplus Humvees, cheap chopper rental and a cast with nothing else on their calendars.
But these cumbersome, dull and incompetently-scripted thrillers have the same people-in-uniform acting un-military in every way action beats. The cast and the characters, a fantasy “off the books” dream team of QAnon fantasy “international cooperation” commandos, haven’t improved.
We also think people have been killed-off, and they haven’t. We assume the “Supreme Leader” (Essam Ferris), has been foiled. Nope.
The hulking Frenchman (Bertrand-Xavier Corbi) still mutters “Theez guy eez PEESING me off!”
Supreme Leader still schemes, plots and plans in his desert hideways, draped in black for his every online video appearance.
“I assure you, our time is coming!”
The Russian sharp shooter (Katie Keene) gets her blonde mop done up in more elaborate braids.
And Chris Mulkey is still the commanding officer, “Brisco,” and still the luckiest actor in the cast. All his scenes are in a tent, “the war room.” As in, he’s not out there in gear and the sweltering, skin-cancerous sun.
Maybe he just has the best agent.
These movies are all junk, the third is no exception.
MPA Rating: R for violence and language
Cast: Will Yun Lee, Jermaine Love, Katie Keene, Essam Ferris, Rory Markham, Fernando Chien, Bertrand-Xavier Corbi and Chris Mulkey.
Credits: Directed by Mike Gunther, script by Michael J. Day. A Saban Films release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:39
The phrase, “You look like the ghost of a Victorian prostitute” could only mean one thing.
“Downton Abbey” is BACK!
Actually, it’s the second season of “Flack,” star Anna Paquin‘s PR version of “Nurse Jackie,” a show with a drug addicted queen of poor decisions facing an unplanned pregnancy, thanks to her corrosive co-worker and closest confidante’s (Lydia Wilson) boyfriend, a fired assistant (Rebecca Benson) manipulated into a return a boss (Sophie Okonedo) taking up with an ex (Sam Neill).
And that’s just the opening salvo of personal “issues” facing this crack London “spin” firm’s crew for Season Two. Clients?
Well, the reality TV darlings have a baby, only it’s not the golfer/husband’s. Twitter has had a field day trashing this latest clumsy “The baby’s Black at birth” TV stunt.
There’s a grey-haired journalist arrested in a raid on a brothel, a tech tycoon (Daniel Kae Kim) who needs help Twitter-apologizing, and who takes a fancy to dishy mean girl Eve (Wilson), this singing star with a temper, that politician needing an image makeover.
You got the idea from season one. More of the same in season two — drama with troubled Robyn’s (Paquin) divorcing sister (Genevieve Angelson), just two Americans trying (kind of) to “pass” for natives in Swinging/Spinning London, making up lies to cover for this celeb disaster here, bribing eyewitnesses there, always with the withering, overly-polished put-downs.
“Good ol’dead-eyed, tight-lipped, draown everyone and yourrself in self-destructive self-pity Robyn.”
The cynicism is more or less intact, although the personal lives take on a more sudsy, soap operatic twist this time around.
I picked up on more self-aware, self-disclosing confessions, or what passes for confessions, with every new client or old treating their hired “flacks” (slang, which I defined when reviewing series season one) as if they’re priests or shrinks, baring their souls because no PR person would ever reveal or use their dirty secrets against them, would they?
This struck me as melodramatic and off.
A pause for a tirade against an abortion nut here, an unscrupulous billionaire instantly recognizing what a “douche” he is there — imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg or Elizabeth Holmes having the self-confidence to do that — the show both has its moments and tends to grate as preachy and on-the-nose at times.
I like the ways it shows how PR has weaponized #MeToo and “bullying.” A “solution” to a troubled celeb marriage is aptly glib and heartless.
“Polyamory is actually super on-trend right now!”
And the dialogue is, first episode to last, crackling and mean. There’s “video” of a celeb assault in a bar.
“It’s bad.”
“Britney with an UMBRELLA bad?”
If you get the references (the links are for memory-jogging purposes only), you’re in on the joke. Occasional emotional moment aside, that’s what we’re here for — heartless, amoral and efficient people efficiently “handling” the all-too-human/often over-the-top foibles of those who pay them for that handling.
How will innocent, Scottish Melody survive this?
“Flack” isn’t necessarily great TV. More of a guilty pleasure. But it is, undeniably, great fun.
MPA Rating: TV-14, sex, drugs, profanity
Cast: Anna Paquin, Lydia Wilson, Rebecca Benson, Sam Neill, Daniel Dae Kim, and Sophie Okonedo
Credits: Created by Oliver Lansley. An Amazon release.
Running time: 12 episodes @43-53 minutes each.
It’s nigh on impossible to single out highlights from the joyously upbeat concert film, “Summer of Love (…Or When the Revolution Could NOT be Televised).”
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. sit, in tears, as they see their performance with The Fifth Dimension for the first time in over fifty years.
Here are Gladys Knight and the Pips at their peak, just about to blow up and just dazzling.
Stevie Wonder makes the leap from “Little Stevie” into adulthood, resetting his career, live on stage in the summer of 1969.
Mavis Staples of The Staples Singers joins her idol, the legendary Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, sharing the mike as they sing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” in tribute.
Abbey Lincoln, B.B. King‘s blues, The Chambers Brothers, Max Roach‘s jazz, Hugh Masekela‘s Afro-accented jazz, Ray Barreto‘s Latin/Afro jazz, comic Moms Mabley, Sly and the Family Stone and the regal Nina Simone all appeared on that stage in Mount Morris Park, an era-defining series of shows in Black music, polished, beautifully filmed and preserved for posterity.
As more than one interview subject makes clear in Roots star and “Tonight Show” bandleader Questlove’s film, Woodstock got all of the musical attention that summer, when America landed on the moon and the ’60s wound down. But the show its documenters, then-and-now, called “Black Woodstock” (a working title of this film) was epic in its own way, with its singularly-impressive line-up playing for a sea of mostly-Black New York faces, 50,000 at a time.
Questlove is a tad disingenuous about what he’s presenting here. The film plays down the fact that this was an entire summer of festivals, not a “Black Woodstock,” putting all these acts on stage over a weekend or whatever. And the title of his film is even more misleading. These shows WERE “televised” on New York PBS later in the summer of ’69, concerts filmed and edited together under director Hal Tulchin.
But he’s right about it being mostly forgotten, that “nobody would believe it happened” save for the long-stored film footage resurrected here.
“Summer of Soul” uses its well-chosen interviews with festival attendees who included journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault and festival participants from singers and band members to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to give us context and a sense of the significance of the concerts.
“Negro” was evolving from “African American” to “Black,” Black fashion from sharkskin suits to leather and dashikis, “Little Stevie” to “Stevie” and Black America from protesting for Civil Rights to bracing for “dealing with white America at its worst” as Richard Nixon took power.
The audience, after a decade of turmoil, was already “radicalized,” if not-quite demoralized from the high profile political murders and riots of the era. The concerts, backed by the city of New York under its mayor, one of the last of a now-extinct political animal, a “liberal Republican,” went off without a hitch, despite having both Black Panthers and the NYPD providing security.
The shows take us back to a day when music was a more unifying force in American life, with many of the shows — featuring The Edwin Hawkins Singers (“Oh Happy Day”) and other Gospel acts — taking on a religious fervor, soul and funk acts sharing the stage with jazz, blues and Gospel ones.
And festival organizer, the “lounge singer” and “a hustler in the best sense,” Tony Lawrence, who also emceed the shows, gets his due. “He talked a big game, and he delivered.”
Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.
MPA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing images, smoking and brief drug material.
Cast: Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr., Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Luis Miranda, Chris Rock, Tony Lawrence, Hal Tulchin and Gladys Knight
Credits: Directed by Ahmir-Khalib “Questlove” Thompson. A Searchlight/Hulu release
Running time: 1:57
“The Birthday Cake” is a lurid, blood-and-marinara-soaked mob movie, another tale of “this neighborhood’s changing” thanks to shifting demographics and an aging mafioso losing his grip. It’s also a coming-of-age story about a kid who wasn’t tough the first time the chips were down. Is he any tougher ten years later?
What it lacks in novelty it somewhat atones for in vivid, slice-of-a-sordid-life scenes, a tour of this corner of Brooklyn taken by our hero (Shiloh Fernandez of “Evil Dead” “and “Edge of Winter”), a young man on foot delivering his “mother’s famous cake” to a birthday party for his father.
On the walk in question, Gio walks into a convenience store, a bakery and a strip club. He’s button-holed by Federal agents and almost forgets the cake in a taxi. And at every step of the way, as he’s accosted, threatened and glad-handed, EVERYbody complains about his Uncle Angelo, the “old boss” who is losing ground on all fronts.
We saw it coming ten years before, as young Gio (David Mazouz) was egged into confronting the intruding “Russians” who humiliated him at school. And despite the best efforts of his Uncle Leo (Emory Cohen), the kid didn’t have it in him.
That came days after his father was murdered. And even though teen Gio only allowed himself to show any emotion to his priest (Ewan McGregor), he manned-up for the family, especially his mother (Lorraine Bracco).
Every year since, there’s been a birthday party for the dead dad, always at Uncle Angelo’s tacky mob mansion. But this year, with Feds and Russians closing in, and with Leo missing, mixed-up in “some business with the Puerto Ricans,” that walk is going to be fraught and interminable.
Fernandez, who is quite good in the lead and who co-wrote the script and co-produced this star vehicle, surrounded himself with stars, which gives the picture an unwieldy quality. Aggressive, noisy Italians over-populate every scene and both color this world he’s living in, and clutter it up.
The always-superb William Fichtner plays the uncle who’s a tough-guy cop. Penn Badgley is club-owner Peeno, John Magaro is one of the louder cousins, with Paul Sorvino a patriarch on a ventilator and Val Kilmer, well-cast as the aged, slipping boss Angelo, playing a man who (like Kilmer himself) has to speak through an electronic voice box.
And on that meandering walk, Gio falls into testy-cute arguments between the bakery-owning couple (Ashley Benson and Jeremy Allen White). They get impromptu marriage counseling from the taxi driver (Luis Guzmán) they all ride with.
A strip-club stop is de rigueur in such films — partly in the name of mob/cop movie authenticity, but mainly because producers like to be surrounded by naked strippers on set.
All those names and faces and locations overwhelm first-time feature director Jimmy Giannopoulos. He sloppily switches the film’s point of view, from Gio’s to others’, just often enough to break the flow. Most characters are poorly-served, as there are so many squeezed in.
In the end, clever third-act twist aside, the excess characters and story threads wreck the over-familiar mob movie recipe of this “Birthday Cake.” It doesn’t so much resolve as leave a bad taste in your mouth.
MPA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, some sexual references, nudity and drug use
Cast: Shiloh Fernandez, Lorraine Bracco, William Fichtner, Aldis Hodge, Penn Badgley, Luis Guzmán, Ashley Benson, Emory Cohen, Ashley Benson, John Magaro, Paul Sorvino, Val Kilmer and Ewan McGregor
Credits: Directed by Jimmy Giannopoulos, script by Shiloh Fernandez, Diomedes Raul Bermudez and Jimmy Giannopoulos. A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:33
Disney/Pixar’s animated “Luca” is “The Little Mermaid” without the heart, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” without the laughs.
It’s a dull if gorgeous-looking time-killer aimed at a very young and undemanding audience, perhaps not too young to ask “Mom, can we go to ITALY?” afterwards.
Because that’s where this is set and that setting is the film’s chief virtue. The sea nymphs who long to taste life on the land are pining for the Italia of cinematic lore, of Fellini and “Cinema Paradiso” and Hollywood stereotypes of Italians — pasta and bambinos, Ray Bans and transistor radios, and Vespas for everyone!
“Santa mozzarella!”
It’s all cute enough. But mamma mia, is this the most empty-headed Pixar script ever? Rhetorical question.
Luca, voiced by Jacob Tremblay of “Wonder” and “Room,” is an undersea tween who stares up and wonders what’s beyond his world. And then he makes the mistake of asking his scaled, finned family (Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan).
“Where do boats come from?”
Granny (Sandy Martin) would totally blather on about going “to the surface” and having “done the change.” His parents shut that down in a flash. Which of course, piques his curiosity.
That’s how he goes above the surface, how he experiences “the change.” And that’s where he meets Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer). Alberto also has “done the change.” But he’s an old hand on life-on-land.
“Everything GOOD is above the surface,” he crows. “Air. Gravity. The SUN!”
Best of all is what they see puttering about the seaport village Alberto shows Luca, that shiny icon of Italian style, minimalism and “freedom” — the Vespa motor scooter, “the greatest thing humans ever made.”
If every “Cars” and “Planes” and “Toy Story” movie Disney and Pixar ever made was designed to sell toys, “Luca” represents the next Disney Great Leap Forward. It has the best product placement of any animated film since “Steamboat Willy.”
“Mom? Can we get a VESPA?”
The boys listen to fishermen and adopt human slang. “Ey, what’s wrong with you, Stupido?”
They try to master walking. “Try to lead with your head,” is Alberto’s advice.
And they try to DIY their own Vespa,”ma certo.”
The “big” theme here is overcoming the fears that keep you from experiencing the world, that “Bruno in your head,” Alberto explains of the little voice that keeps one from taking chances. “Don’t listen to stupid Bruno!”
That applies to the humans, too. They have a notion there are creatures beneath the Mediterranean. They have fears and prejudices about them. And they have harpoons.
Luckily, the nymphs-turned-boys are befriended by Giulia (Emma Berman). Her one-armed fisherman dad (Marco Barricelli) probably wouldn’t approve if he knew.
But hey, they like his pasta.
There’s a bully who has the coolest Vespa, and a big contest the boys could compete in and win. It involves running and swimming and eating pasta.
All they have to do to fit in is “don’t get wet.” Because that’s how they “change” back.
The cute-enough bits are Alberto’s delusional “explanations” of things and life on dry land, the night sky is filled with “anchovies and the Big Fish (the moon),” pining over a world where wild Vespas roam free — in their dreams.
But those bits are few and far between. The sight-gags are tiny-tyke simple, the jokes rare. And lacking musical numbers — What, no romantic ballad longing for a Vespa? — there just isn’t much to “Luca,” something Disney wisely decided was better as a streaming offering than anything they’d put in theaters.
MPA Rating: PG for rude humor, language, some thematic elements and brief violence
Cast: The voices of Jacob Tremplay, Jack Dylan Grazer, Maya Rudolph, Emma Berman, Marco Barricelli, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jim Gaffigan
Credits: Directed by Enrico Casarosa, script by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones. A Disney/Pixar release on Disney+.
Running time: 1:35
Mid July from UnCork’d.
Has there ever been a World War II classic that starts as clumsily as “A Walk on the Sun?”
Corny ballad with printed sing-along lyrics, a poorly-faked landing craft voyage that never gives you any sense that the GIs on board are actually at sea, arch dialogue, including one private (played by John Ireland) who recites aloud his next planned letter home to his sister.
“Dear Frances, I am writing you this letter relaxing on the deck of a luxury liner. On shore the natives have evidently just spotted us and are getting up a reception – fireworks, music and that sort of stuff. Ha…”
There’s a solid 20+ minutes of this cheese. Even when the platoon’s lieutenant is hit offshore (and off-camera) and the drawling medic (Sterling Holloway) jokes his way forward to treat a dying man, everything about this opening act screams “The director was born during the Victorian Era,” as indeed Lewis Milestone was. Stodgy. Old fashioned hokum.
But once you get past the hokum, this is surprisingly sober and grimly realistic for its day. Eventually the style settles down, the “Wait wait wait” because “this is the Army, after all” tedium begins to resonate and the characters and the fine actors who play them start to make their marks.
Norman Lloyd is the put-upon complainer who figures he’ll “make sergeant” eventually, by the time they fight “The Battle of Tibet, in 1956.”
We tend to forget, in the middle of this global war, nobody really knew how long it would take to turn back fanatical fascists and anybody else who threatened liberty.
Richard Conte is the wise-ass machine gunner with a funny line for any eventuality. Italian deserters surrender to the platoon.
“Ask’em if they know where I can get a pizza.”
Lloyd Bridges is the farmer turned sergeant who might be the most competent NCO, and certainly the bravest.
Ireland is the poet, Windy, always composing those letters aloud, waxing lyrical about “GI dirt” and piping up when his commanders don’t have a clue.
“You’re a pretty shrewd guy, Windy.”
“That’s what I tell myself, all the time.”
And Dana Andrews is the stoical sergeant following the chain of command, even though the second in command (Herbert Rudley), nervous but in charge after the lieutenant’s death, has no one’s confidence.
“How’s baby?” Andrews’ Sgt. Tyne asks of the GI cradling his Thompson sub machine-gun, its butt covered in notches for “kills.”
“I’ll wake her up when I need her.”
The platoon is packed with troops when they land. They have a simple mission, seize a farmhouse stronghold, blow up a bridge below it.
As they duck strafing German fighters and take on tanks (off camera) and a machine-gun equipped halftrack (on camera), men die, and not generally in melodramatic ways. Nobody stops to mourn or get sentimental. Milestone — he directed the definitive 1930s film version of the anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”– and screenwriter Robert Rossen (“All the President’s Men” and “The Hustler”) give this movie, filmed while the war was winding down, a dose of unemotional reality in between the wisecracks.
“It’s a funny thing, how many people you meet in an army that cross your path for a few seconds and you never see ’em again.”
The combat is messy, inefficient, just like the real thing. Half the platoon hurls grenades at that hafltrack. It takes forever to disable and then take out.
The assault on the farmhouse, even by combat veterans, has a “follow orders” fatalism. There’s no Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne derring do. The machine gunner is to keep the Germans pinned down.
“I’m gonna aim for the knees, and then work north,” Pvt. Rivera (Conte) chortles.
They send a squad out to flank the house. “Volunteers? “
“Pass out the purple hearts, mother!”
“Any extra pay?”
“Naah.”
“Then I’ll go anyway, just to make them feel ashamed.”
The rest of the platoon will charge. A lot of them will go down.
The hokum here is mostly in the opening and closing moments, where singer Kenneth Spencer croons “the ballads.” The combat sequences, from quick sketches that show how limited your average GI’s field of vision is — What’s that explosion over there? Where’s that smoke coming from? Who’s coming up behind us? Are we all alone? — to the big set piece in the finale, are handled with professional polish.
After a while, even Windy’s narrated letters home stop sounding so damned hokey.
“Dear Frances, we just blew a bridge and took a farmhouse. It was so easy… so terribly easy.”
It’s not “The Ballad of GI Joe” or as good as the combat films of the ’50s. But if you run across “A Walk in the Sun,” as I have over the years, don’t let the first 20+ minutes chase you away. Ireland, Bridges, Conte, Andrews and Milestone make it well worth your while.
MPA Rating: “Approved”
Cast: Dana Andrews, Lloyd Bridges, Richard Conte, John Ireland, Huntz Hall, Sterling Holloway, Herbert Rudley and Norman Lloyd
Credits: Directed by Lewis Milestone, script by Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Harry Brown.
Running time: 1:57
About “The Serpent,” the spy thriller scripted, directed and starring model Gia Skova. Every other filmmaker who has had her or his finished movie described as “incoherent” or “makes no sense at all” is owed an apology after this.
“The Serpent” opens with the worst car chase in film history, a chase that includes a lot of shooting where no one hits ANYthing — An homage to TV’s “Police Squad?” — and then the picture goes completely nonsensical, with a plot that would seem even worse if we could discern all of Skova’s lines, delivered in a vaguely-Britishized Euro-Russian accent.
“Are we cleared for keel chots?” Her superior is as confused as we are. Oh. “Kill shots!”
Her self-scripted/directed star vehicle has her and her very long hair playing a spy named Lucinda out to foil a plot by the titular villain, to have bombs, surgically planted in children, blow up all over the world.
She is captured, does pushups in prison, takes care to keep her hair out of her cheeks-sucked-in-Jolie face, brawls her way into an escape in her runway-ready black combat shorts And you kind of get the picture.
None of it makes a lick of sense. Her hair should have second billing. The best thing that could have happened in this film would have been my leaving her name as I originally misunderstood it to be (Stova) in the headline.
Perhaps there’s a drinking game in this? Take a shot every time her character grabs a gun, take two shots every time she fiddles with her hair?
MPA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Gia Skova, Travis Aaron Wade, Nigel Vonas, Akihiro Kitamura and Richard E. Wilson.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Gia Skova. A Vertical release.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 