Let’s see how this works out. Warner Brothers sent a screener in the wee hours of the morning, and I know from past experience that their screener system is one of limitless limitations (Smart TVs…and Android phones? WTF?).
But it looks cute so let’s give it a shot.
Wise is the pop star who knows how to preserve a little mystery about themselves, even in the age of “over-sharing” and the microscope that is social media.
Her most obsessed fans can find out bits of this and that. Some, I dare say, even figured out where she lives with her family in a middle-class home in Greater Los Angeles (Highland Park).
But there’s so much we don’t know, and still won’t know after watching the intimate and somewhat revealing documentary profile, “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,” on Apple TV+.
We meet a seemingly-unguarded, generally-unfiltered and determinedly unselfconscious young woman, tracked through her quick rise to fame late in her 16th year, through her 17th and well into her 18th.
Director R.J. Cutler, who did the Vogue doc “The September Issue,” the superb supernatural teen death drama “If I Stay” and the TV doc series “American High,” was well-suited to the subject. But as we see the teen use her mom as a stand-in and home props to block out her concept for a music video, as we see her sketch out songs (basically storyboards), the visual and emotional effect she is going for with them, as we hear her bluntly tell her mother how she’s going to warn this or that music video director about what she WON’T be doing, we can wonder how much control Cutler had over the project.
I mean, nobody is identified in it. We can figure out who her dad is, her mom and Finneas the brother/collaborator/co-star. None are ID’d by name. So this person giving feedback is from…her management company? Interscope Records? That one going over her physical regimen — her free-form and athletic dancing gives her shinsplints and “throws out” her neck at one point — is a physical therapist, personal chiropractor, trainer, chakra choreographer?
Chelsea?
She’s 19, stupidly famous and ridiculously open-hearted around her fans. Mosh pits and hugs for people standing in line don’t see very Queen Bey or Tay Tay. So if she wants to keep her location, her family’s names and the somewhat-overwhelmed and handsome African American boyfriend she had at the time of filming out of the public eye, that’s understandable.
She calls him “Q” and he has a $700 haircut and bright red dye job, and that’s enough.
But 140 minutes of “fly on the wall” filmmaking, mostly of Eilish performing, songwriting (or avoiding it, as her brother complains), doing photo shoots and radio interviews and peaking at Coachella is a bit much. Celebrating her staggering sales and Grammy success with a family-gifted Dodge Challenger (We watch her pass her driving test, and give her car its first wash) and recycling her Creation Myth — social media star, bedroom recording her debut LP “and she’s so young” –leaves the film a “blur.”
Glimpses and only glimpses of home movies show the full-throated childhood of Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell and the “musical family” she grew up in.
“Our family was just one big f—–g song!”
Clips show her in the dance training she underwent until injuries curtailed that. She mentions her body dysmorphia without connecting that to dance, but declares her aversion to “tiny, tight outfits.” As unselfconscious as she seems, she is super-self conscious about that, thus the oversized shirts and baggy shorts that are her uniform.
She confesses to her years of self-injury, cutting herself as punishment for whatever failings she saw in herself at 14. She mentions having Tourette’s, but she comes off like any other unfiltered teen you run into these days.
Eilish likes drawing genitals and dropping the F-bomb, and the only hint of ego slips in with a “How do people NOT miss me? I would miss me!”
Her art comes from “never feeling happy,” but she’s pretty giddy a lot of the time. Who wouldn’t be? But “I feel the dark things,” obvious from her music, is what sells. Her brother is the one with his eyes on the business here, Mr. “We need to write a hit” in this R-rated version of The Carpenters. Getting her to sit down and collaborate on a tune is a chore, though. And she’s already complaining that this or that new material is “just like everything else we’ve ever done.”
She gets it. If the distinct and once red-hot Miley and Adele and Katy and Lady Gaga can turn a tad passe, Eilish won’t be able to avoid it.
Childhood Justin Bieber fan reluctant to do a duet with her now-married longtime skirt-chasing idol, radio interview guest who reminds us of how young she is by all the pop culture references she doesn’t get, and Queen of Coachella who gets a backstage visit from the four-model-years previous queen, Katy Perry.
“This is gonna be WILD for 10 years,” Perry warns her. “So if you wanna talk…”
No, the 17 year-old girl with “Pirate” in her name and a mania for “Pirates of the Caribbean” doesn’t recognize the handsome man Katy introduces as her fiance, Orlando Bloom. But once she makes the connection, she reaches out for a second meeting like every fangirl in her audience.
The tour stops and performances pad “A Little Blurry” to its bloated 2:20 running time, not that fans will mind. As someone who wondered if she had real singing chops when she whispery processed voice first blew up, I was impressed with a couple of performances. But like her, you can hear the songs are “just like everything else we’ve ever done,” and that makes the film drag and drag in its last hour.
She’s just 19. Eighty minutes would have been more than adequate to cover her life thus far, especially if you aren’t interviewing her or even identifying everybody in that life with her.
MPA Rating: R, profanity and lots of it.
Cast: Billie Eilish, Finneas, Maggie Baird, Patrick O’Connell, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom
Credits: Directed by R.J. Cutler. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 2:21
Yes, this looks as generically “contest” oriented as way too many martial arts thrillers and a lot of video game adaptations as well.
But this R Rated run through the XBox or Playstation but not Wii of gamefan’s wet dreams set a trailer viewership record in just a week.
Kinda sick, if you asked me
“Crisis” is an opioid thriller that comes out on the heels of “Body Brokers,” more of an explanatory drama about the other end of this pharmaceutical calamity — addiction’s rehab racket.
“Body” angles to be a “Blow” on this broader subject, a “Big Short” of opioids, and more of less gets by. “Crisis” has hints of “Traffic” in its ambitions.
And damn, typing out that analogy and checking the release dates of the earlier drug movies is chilling. Twenty years ago it was cocaine, today’s its oxycodone. “Progress.”
Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki (“Arbitrage”) pokes at this monkey on America’s back through three interlocking stories.
The pipeline through Canada that brings Chinese oxy South is shifting to the next drug — Fentanyl. Armie Hammer plays a DEA agent undercover and closing in on a bust, pressured by his boss (Michelle Rodriguez) to produce results on a short deadline. America is losing 100,000 people a year to overdose deaths.
We see the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) grab a courier trekking through snow south of Montreal, chasing him down by chopper and snowmobile. That wasn’t part of the plan.
And our DEA agent? He’s taking this personally. His little sister (Lily-Rose Depp) is a junkie, something Agent Kelly goes to great lengths to hide, sneaking around to visit her in rehab.
A single mom in Detroit (Evangeline Lilly) has her hockey-mad teen stop off at the store for her, and never come home. He turns up as a corpse, another victim of an oxy overdose.
And a Detroit college professor (Gary Oldman) runs a university lab that’s testing a new “miracle” “non-addictive” painkiller pushed by a Big Pharma (Luke Evans, Veronica Ferres and Martin Donovan). He’s a wit in the classroom and an efficient grant-money magnet and corporate rubber-stamp in the lab. But damn, this Klaralon stuff triggers rats into addiction that kills them within days. You’d hope the FDA would care about that.
As the film skips back and forth in settings (Jarecki doesn’t ID them, but lets us figure them out), we see a mother hunt for her son, and weep in her sister’s (Mia Kirshner) arms when they find him in the morgue, She wants answers. Maybe she wants revenge.
“David wasn’t on drugs. I would know!”
The juggling DEA agent has to keep a lot of scary people happy as he sets up a pill mill with “corrupt doctors” to convince a Canadian kingpin and his own Armenian mobsters to do business. And keep his sister in rehab and off drugs.
“Don’t start with that ‘paranoid’ s–t with me!”
And the professor watches his career go up in flames for slowing the roll of Big Pharma.
“How could they not have caught this?”
This is probably the last Armie Hammer movie we may see for a while, and he’s good enough in this latest action guise to make us a little wistful over what he did to his career, all over some cannibalistic kink. I knew he was biting that damned peach with a little too much gusto.
Lilly got a nice career bounce out of “Ant-Man,” and plays a lovely moment of grief that’s real and almost wrenching, here. The role is underwritten, as are most of the parts in this shuffling, moving puzzle.
Oldman can play this professor in his sleep, but doesn’t. He has some nice moments of conscience and some civilized testy conflict with his university boss, another villainous shill on Greg Kinnear’s resume.
The three stories could each have been their own movie, and probably a more compelling one than this mash-up turns out to be. Everybody gets in everybody else’s way for the first two and a half acts.
But the ending has a satisfying punch to it. That’s not a wholehearted endorsement of this mixed-bag, but it’s the best I can do.
MPA Rating: R for drug content, violence, and language throughout
Cast: Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Gary Oldman, Kid Cudi, Mia Kershner, Michelle Rodriguez, Martin Donovan, Lily-Rose Depp, Veronica Ferres and Greg Kinnear.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Jarecki. A Quiver release.
Running time: 1:58
Here’s a drab little romance about a guy who might not be ready to “get back out there” because his late wife’s still in his head. Literally. He starts seeing her ghost.
And Sarah (Yael Stone) took those vows seriously, the ones that end with “As Long as We Both Shall Live.” Shouldn’t Malcolm (Josh Helman) do the same?
There are two ways you’d guess this would go. One is sad but silly, with Sarah tormenting the guy about “moving on,” or Malcolm being too reluctant to “let go.” The other is she haunts him, terrorizes the cute barmaid Nya (Jennifer Allcott), maybe even KILLS her.
That’s the Blumhouse version.
What director and co-writer Ali Askari goes for here is far more bland, not particularly romantic, not that cute, not really all that disturbing.
Sarah went out for baking soda for a cake she was forcing loving hubby Malcolm to make. She never came home. A year later, her sister (Yvonne Cone) taunts him into “rejoining society.”
His boss and partner in the Utica, NY real-estate investment business that Malcolm’s dad co-founded is Jim (Paul Sorvino), a near-hysteric who sees bankruptcy around every corner and a stroke in every breath.
“We’re all gonna DIE.”
One prospective business deal and montage of blind-dates that Dee (Cone) sets up later, he stumbles into the cute bar wench Nya. Maybe life will get better and happiness will return. Maybe he’ll tell her he’s widowed. Maybe after she hits him with this.
“Why are you moping? Moping is for losers!”
And then, just as things turn “interesting” — in the traditional use of the word, not as it’s employed here — a scolding Sarah starts appearing to Malcolm and it could all come to pieces.
Aussie “Mad Max” supporting player Helman looks a bit like Chris Pratt, only not the least bit funny. Not that the script does him any favors. There’s little cute and charming to play, other than Malcolm’s habit of saying “M’lady” to Nya on their first date.
Allcott, of “Kate Can’t Swim,” filmed after this 2016 film (just now coming out), has a Parker Posey look and a hint of perky. But as Malcolm and Nya chat and carry on in the quietest bar in America, one strains for a laugh or a taste of romance and struggles to figure out what tone they’re going for and why they aren’t hitting it.
That “quietest bar” crack is a clue. There’s little to no background life to any scenes. Static business meetings where Malcolm distractedly tries to text this free spirit who’s just entered his life, dull arguments with the dead wife here and there, a party that doesn’t have the background action to seem like a party at all.
“As Long as We Both Shall Live” is underpopulated and lifeless, as stark as Nya’s stand-up comic pal’s act, and the anemic response to it.
It’s not bad so much as not all there, although I think I’ll go as far as calling this lifeless four-handed script not worth filming.
MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations
Cast: Josh Helman, Yael Stone, Jennifer Allcott, Yvonne Cone and Paul Sorvino
Credits: Directed by Ali Askari, scripted by Ali Askari, Joe McKernan, Golan Ramraz and Adam C. Sherer. A Boom Pictures release.
Running time: 1:37
Film is still, a hundred years into “talkies,” a visual medium.
Few things fly more in the face of that than a movie whose screenplay is largely a long run of monologues. If a voice-over narration is your idea of how to adapt a novel, then you haven’t “adapted” it at all. Images and actions are the deft and most engrossing way to tell a story.
“Cherry” is a Russo Brothers film based on a Nico Walker novel. They throw a lot of visual flourishes in the mix, take us into combat in Iraq and drug addiction and bank robberies in Cleveland.
But they leave the storytelling to the endless narration of the title character, an Army medic who “pops his cherry” in love, then in combat, later with heroin and finally with how he has to finance that PTSD habit, bank robberies.
From “Sometimes, I wonder if life is wasted on me” to “Everything there was about dying,” Cherry (Tom Holland) goes on and on, restating the obvious, explaining the visuals, telling us what the character’s thinking or feeling when that’s the task of acting.
Voice-over is a way of cut and pasting novel, cramming more content-and-context into your movie. When you’re taking us from college, first love (Ciara Bravo) with that girl who has “a thing for weak guys,” through the break-up that prompts him to enlist (in 2003), into the make-up after the break-up, through basic-training, Iraq combat, homecoming, drugs and then back to the robbery we see in the opening moments, all that narration just drags the picture to a halt.
A somewhat familiar story arc turns tedious long before the second hour of “Cherry” begins. And it goes on well beyond that second hour, too.
The Russos give us their take on basic training, with Cherry narrating “There was a lot of yelling,” helpful to those who haven’t noticed the drill sergeants doing just that. Really helpful to that rare bird who’s never seen a movie that depicts basic training.
They take us into combat, the tragedy of making friends in a combat zone, of letting yourself care when the Army promotes the most unquestioning cogs in the machine to Sergeant, where they assume authority equates with infallibility.
Then come the night terrors and shakes of PTSD back home, with your wife traumatized by proxy. That’s why Cherry gets into drugs and plunges into bank robbing to pay off his dealer, “Pills & Coke” (Jack Reynor) and Pills’ mostly-unseen and supposedly much-scarier boss, Black (Daniel R. Hill).
The Russos, who handled the last years of the Marvel/”Avengers-Captain America” run, try to whizbang their way through all this, leaving us with a relationship that lacks warmth, a tsunami of peripheral characters who barely register and a hero who talks and talks and talks and never lets us get inside his skin. They show that hero in situations — from combat to addiction to robbing banks — that have been better-blocked, staged and filmed by legions of filmmakers who came before them.
The only “jokes” here are the names of the banks our young vet robs — “Capitalist One,” “Sh—ybank” among them.
A true adaptation would have thinned every chapter of this film down, eliminated characters. This reminds me of the Chris Columbus “Harry Potter” movies, filmmakers afraid to leave out a single damned page of the book.
They don’t flinch at showing us the gruesome side of combat. But it’s like they’re at a loss about what to do with real people, real situations, real traumas or emotions without comic book men and women in tights and lots and lots of effects.
Well, at least they got a relative a screenwriting credit and another relative in the cast. Us? We got this grind of a movie to sit through.
MPA Rating: R for graphic drug abuse, disturbing and violent images, pervasive language, and sexual content
Cast: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor. Jeff Wahlberg, Michael Rispoli, Ann Russo, Daniel R. Hill and Theo Barklem-Biggs
Credits: Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. Script by Angela Russo-Ostot and Jessica Goldeberg, based on a novel by Nico Walker. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 2:20
The English scientist Michael Faraday is worth quoting as Gospel while taking in “‘Til Kingdom Come,” a new Israeli-made documentary.
“There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.”
The film is about the unsettling alliance between that country’s far right, its West Bank “settler” movement and their dear leader, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and American evangelical Christians –conservative, mostly-rural, largely Southern “fundamentalists.”
As director/interviewer Maya Zinshtein travels and talks with pastors, lobbyists, Trump “evangelical advisory board” folk and assorted right wing Israelis lobbying Washington or fund-raising for The Fellowship of Christians and Jews, you never heard so many dead-certain-they-are-right zealots in all your life.
When Pastor Boyd Bingham IV sits down with a Palestinian Christian Pastor Naim Khoury of First Baptist Church in Bethlehem, he hears concerns like “When evangelicals look at the West Bank, they look at the land as ’empty.’ They simply ignore the continuing occupation of the Palestinian people.”
After leaving Pastor Khoury’s church Bingham — in line to inherit the family business the way his daddy inherited Binghamton Baptist from his daddy — spits out “There’s no such thing as a ‘Palestinian.'”
He’s sure of it. Biblically sure. We’ve already seen him out in the woods, taking target practice with his assault rifle. We’ve heard that “Trump spoke to people like me,” rural people who “felt looked down on” by America at large. And we’ve listened in during his “indoctrination (his word)” of Sunday school kids at his daddy’s church, where they learn of Israel’s importance and that “Their people, the Jews, are better than all of us. And you need to accept that.”
And at that moment, with an Evangelical pastor of a Baptist church in the city where Jesus was born, reaching out and trying to turn a heart towards tolerance and light, we see the scale of the problem Zinshtein is pointing out.
Armed New Testament literalists have allied themselves with the most fascist government in Israel’s history, and are spending money they don’t have — judging by the intense poverty of Middlesboro and Bell County, Kentucky — to support that government and its increasingly belligerent policies. They’re doing this by donating to the The Fellowship of Christians and Jews, another quasi-religious/totally political “family business” recently passed down from its founder, Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein, to his daughter Yael.
Zinshtein takes us from Middlesboro to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea to D.C. and a Beverly Hills gala for the Friends of Israel Defense Forces, one of the beneficiaries of this “fellowship” between right wing Christians and Israelis willing to take their money and use their political clout.
We see the endless parade of Fellowship of Christians and Jews commercials, and a TV sampling of sometimes-incendiary “end times” and “Rapture” rhetoric from Southern pulpits, especially that of Texas Pastor John Hagee. We sit in on Trump era lobbying efforts by displace-the-Palestinians-with-more-‘Settlements activists like Yossi Dagan.
Pat Robertson happily sits down for a chat about his role in providing the seed money for The Fellowship of Christians and Jews via his televised “700 Club” in the 1980s, because despite asking sometimes tough questions about “hypocrisy” in this alliance, Zinshtein is unfailingly polite.
And in occasional candid moments, Yael Eckstein admits being conflicted by aligning Israel with people who, as we see repeatedly, are watching world news to “translate geopolitical reality through the lens of prophecy,” and sound eager for the End Times to arrive.
“God is watching every missile!” as one Hellfire and brimstone preacher bellows.
“Is there an elephant in the room?” Eckstein wonders. “Yeah.”
If Jews are in for “seven years of torment” and slaughter according to fundamentalist interpretations of The Book of Revelations, and evangelicals are hellbent on bringing that about, maybe pushing to get Trump to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem won’t just lead to Palestinians deaths (58 in the days right after that embassy opened in 2018).
If a corner of Christianity that only recently shed open, braying anti-Semitism says it’s your friend, coopts your menorah and Star of David and insists it knows what’s best for you, perhaps taking a step back from the brink is the smart play.
There’s too little push-back provided here, a few Palestinians, former U.S. official Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace saying “I don’t think Israelis appreciate the bargain they’ve made.”
But Zinshtein covers enough of the bases and gives all those she interviews the screen time to speak their truth. And if they’re a gun nut, grievance-wielding pastor who is sure he’s not the crackpot he comes off as here, merely “right,” we all ought to be worried. Dogmatic cranks shouldn’t be setting dark, confrontational policies when their fondest hope is that they’re self-fulfilling.
Cast: Yael Eckstein, Pat Robertson, Pastor John Hagee, Lara Friedman, Rev. Johnnie Moore, Yossi Dagan, Pastor Boyd Bingham IV
Credits: Directed by Maya Zinshtein, script by Mark Monroe. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:17
Michael Winterbottom, one of my favorite directors, leaves behind Coogan and Bryson “Trip” comedies and gets back to the political thrillers he’s best at with this upcoming film.
He did “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “The Road to Guantanamo” and “A Mighty Heart” before Coogan, Brydon and he did “Tristram Shandy” and all those “Trip” movies — “Greed.”
Damn, Sir Ken is a DEAD ringer for ol’ BJ, wot wot?
“This Sceptered Isle,” a scheduled British TV series, is about the unlikely turn that brought Britain to Brexit and the journalist, provocateur, politician and TV guest “clown” on many a show, including “Top Gear,” Boris Johnson’s rise to prime minister.
There are few things more maddening than sitting through a thriller that should work, that has the requisite elements in place, and just doesn’t.
“The Stylist” is about a lonely, awkward and murderous hair dresser who drugs and scalps her victims, wearing their hair and play-acting their voices like Buffalo Bob in “Silence of the Lambs.” Tell me that isn’t a killer (ahem) concept.
Running with the “People tell their stylist the most intimate things” idea is a great hook, a “reason” for envy, resentment and revenge, at least according to murderous redhead Claire (Najarra Townsend) seems like it can’t miss. Director and co-writer Jill Gevargizian does miss. Why?
Pace. It always comes down to that in thrillers. You think you’re adding suspense by slow-walking us through scenes, slo-motioning the hair-styling montages. You’re not. You’re losing us.
With thrillers in general and horror in particular, once you’ve established the dread, it’s time to TCB.
We “get it.” Now “get ON with it.”
Once it’s established that Claire’s primary victim will be the frazzled but smart, professional and thoughtful bride-to-be Olivia (Brea Grant), the throw-down is set up. .
Bowl cuts for the bitchy bridesmaids? A little lethal snip-snip-snip at the rehearsal dinner? A grisly grooming of the groom? The possibilities are laid out, ripe for the picking.
Instead we linger over Claire’s tortured loneliness. We waste screen time on a succession of needy text messages, all this AFTER we’ve taken forever to set up our monster and her pivotal victim.
Townsend is a mainstay of B-horror and was in the short film this is based on. She’s an arresting presence without much to chew on here. Claire is more wounded than tortured, more brooding than psychotic. It’s an uninteresting performance which might not have mattered so much had this picture clipped by.
It doesn’t. So much was dispensed with — how Claire disposes of bodies and covers up her crimes, her mastery of breaking and entering. Why not cut the far less interesting stuff, the dead seconds after the payoff moment in most every scene?
There might be a solid 80 minute thriller tucked into the 104 minute dawdle. As I said, we get it. Get on with it.
Gevargizian never does.
MPA Rating:unrated, graphic bloody violence
Cast: Najarra Townsend, Brea Grant, Jennifer Seward
Credits:Directed by Jill Gevargizian, script by Jill Gevargizian, Eric Havens and Eric Stolze. An Arrow release.
Running time: 1:44
Long before this little “Thank you for your support” package was even dreamed up, I was swooning over this American Classic about houselessness not “homelessness.” They live on wheels on the road, the American migrants, the new “Okies,” in perpetual “Nomadland.”
Granted, I live on a sailboat, not in an RV. But I see these people, this “tribe” everywhere.
Maybe I’ll pass on the dashboard sunscreen to some Queen of the Road I run across. The license plate? VW bound.
Thanks Searchlight Pictures, and good luck with the Oscar nominations.
See “Nomadland,” the best American pic of 2020.
Movie Nation 