A modern day Western about women who work “outside the law” to get what they need? I’m there.
The town of the title, “Little Woods,” is supposedly in North Dakota. I used to LIVE in North Dakota. They told me, “Move here, Rodg. There’s a single woman behind every tree.”
So a town called “Little Trees” in a state with very few if any trees? I have my doubts.
Tessa Thompson and Lily James are the leads — fans of both. James Badge Dale is in it, too. “Little Woods” opens Friday.
Back in 1970, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, did a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future.
Land pulled a wallet for size comparison out of his pocket and spoke of “a camera that would be like, oh, the telephone…our long awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.”
More than one wag has suggested, with cause, that Land was predicting the birth of the cell phone camera.
“For a product to be truly new, the world must not be ready for it,” he said. The world wasn’t ready for cell-phones then, any more than it was ready for instant “one-step photography” which Land’s camera, unveiled in Feb. of 1947, heralded.
But one thing Land could not have envisioned was the photographers, artists and others who would not let go of his out-of-date tech even after his death (in 1991) or his company’s demise (2008).
“Instant Dreams” is an ethereal, trippy look at the properties of the film favored by aficionados, the “Impossible” chemistry that made these “develops in 60 seconds” images and the nostalgia for this very human, analog technology from a time before “the digital dark ages took over our lives.”
Dutch filmmaker Willem Baptist has a hint of Werner Herzog about his style. His truth-in-advertising “dreamy” documentary follows quirky German-born artist Stefanie Schneider, who wanders the deserts of the American Southwest in a vintage pink bathrobe and Crocs, taking Polaroid art shots of her hen and whatever model she can engage for the day.
Schneider has a hoard of foil-packet expiration-dated Polaroid film stockpiled in her vintage fridge (naturally) because “Colors show up in a very very different way, not what you actually see with your eyes” on these photographs. She relishes even the splotches, bars or streaks, the age-or-light induced imperfections of such images.
We track Stephen Herchen, a retired Polaroid chemist as he works with “The Impossible Project” trying to decode “a perfect chemical formula” that “changed the way we captured and imagined the world” which Land and Co. came up with for their almost magical process, but which was lost as the company died.
And New York magazine editor and author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid” Chris Bonanos provides the history of Land and the camera and preaches and practices its use to one and all, a prophet for an analog religion that has all but disappeared in our digital age.
Baptist treats us to lurid images of chemicals mixing and molecules bonding.
We hear snippets of voices from the past — such as Land himself, both explaining the camera and philosophizing about how it changes the world and where it fits in human evolution.
We hear newsman Lowell Thomas on old newsreels extolling the virtues of this “new” technology — “press a button, and have a picture.”
Long-dead science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke discusses how tricky it is, predicting the future and being ahead of your time, as Land was.
And we hear a performance by Werner Herzog himself, passionately, creepily, seductively instructing the listener on how to use these amazing old school cameras.
There are TV commercials, mostly from Europe, advertising this product of American ingenuity (not, alas, the famed James Garner/Mariette Hartley ads from “Peak Polaroid” here in the US).
Bonanos describes and even demonstrates (Baptist follows him in to parties, out in public with his camera) the “social” interchange” that is part of why he thinks of this process as inherently human, because waiting for the shot to develop “forces you to make small talk to fill in the moment.”
The cameras were knocked, back in the day, for not providing images as sharp and deep as 35mm film, an idea which Bonanos scoffs — “The eye forgives everything if it’s a good photograph.”
Missing from all these unidentified speakers, models and witnesses, is any sense of the tactile connection that has made all things analog — from watches to turntables to real wood to celluloid — so popular with the young and the hip.
Baptist loses himself in the artist’s reverie, a little mini film within a film starring the actor Udo Kier in the desert, and in the swirls of chemicals that tie the various sequences together.
“Instant Dreams” still turns out to be a pretty good argument for the magical in a world that is “losing magic.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, a couple of instances of profanity
Cast: Stefanie Schneider, Stephen Herchen, Chris Bonanos
Credits: Written and directed by Willem Baptist. A Synergetic release.
Running time: 1:31
Bob Probert was a hockey goon from the Golden Age of Hockey Goons, a two-fisted brawler who made Detroit fans care more about the fights than the scoreboard when he skated for the Red Wings.
From the mid-80s into the early 2000s, the tall and bulky Probert was “The Heavyweight Champion” of the NHL. He scored some goals and never made it to the Stanley Cup, the National Hockey League’s championship series.
But he loomed large over his sport for over a decade. Probert’s career, as the new documentary “Tough Guy: The Bob Probert Story” reminds us, was measured in fights and penalty minutes, not in goals and assists and affixing your team’s name to the Cup.
It was Probert vs. Stu Grimson or Probert vs. Donald Brashear and Probert vs. Wendel Clark.
And it was Probert vs. Tie Dormi, where even a “loss,” bloodied on the ice, earned a little Probert spin — “I didn’t get hurt. It wasn’t a solid punch. I didn’t get beat. He just got lucky.”
Geordie Day’s somewhat unwieldy film dwells on what hockey fans used to show up to games for — the fights — in painting a portrait of a Windsor, Ontario cop’s son who was taught to be tough, to never back down and never cry.
We get a taste of an unhappy childhood that never really ended, thanks to the sport’s way of identifying promising players young, taking them out of school and putting them in the junior ranks on their way up the ladder to the NHL.
Probert, at 6 foot three, over 200 pounds, with long arms and the permanent chip on his shoulder of a team “enforcer,” “protecting” his more vulnerable teammates, was a brute on the ice.
Watch him cheap shot a goalie or two and try to find sympathy for the guy. It’s hard.
In interviews over the years, he comes off as a foul-mouthed kid, a hulking child with impulse control issues and a drinking and drugs problem that started in his teens, put him in rehab a score or more times and landed him in Federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota, at one point.
Teammates, foes, family, coaches and longtime host of “Hockey Night in Canada,” Don Cherry, marvel at the brawls — two ungainly men wrestling and swinging on ice, on skates, covered in protective gear that would inevitably get torn off in the 30-100 second “bouts.”
When former teammate Bruce Bell declares, “He didn’t like fighting…he did it because he had to do it” in “protecting his teammates” in the film, it helps that this assertion comes before we’ve seen the man split a player’s helmet open with a stick.
It’s a miracle this coked-up brute didn’t kill somebody. And as we learn of his many wrecks and DUI arrests over the years, we marvel at the miracle that he didn’t kill somebody, or himself, off the ice as well.
“There was two sides of Bob, and you didn’t want to be on the wrong one,” a former foe notes.
Day’s film touches lightly on the CTE (brain injuries) that can come from incessant bare-knuckle brawling, and on the many efforts to keep Probert sober, which his teammates and fans helped him to dodge.
We hear Probert boast of “fighting my way into the big leagues,” see him meet that goal and gain the infamy that let him meet the Carlson Brothers of “Slap Shot,” and D.B. Sweeney of “The Cutting Edge,” and hear Mr. T give him a shout out as “the toughest man on ice.”
But we also get a dose of the addictions that held him back, and a taste of Probert’s bitterness at being caught out drinking with teammates in a playoff series with Edmonton in which the Red Wings had a shot at playing for the Stanley Cup.
Keith Gave, the beat writer on the Red Wings for the Detroit Free-Press, is scorned for reporting on that incident and Probert’s years of run-ins with the law over his imbibing. Gave is more forgiving now, but not Probert’s teammates.
Filmmaker Day doesn’t make the movie’s hero very heroic, from cocaine to steroids, arrests to fights on and off the ice. He was “out of control” those who knew him admit.
But cut quite the figure, in his time. And he left a mark.
If the game is more civilized now, it’s thanks to the excesses of bullying brutes like Bob Probert. That’s a message Day doesn’t take the time to get across, leaving “Tough Guy” a little thin in the “And your point is?” department.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and discussions of drug abuse
Cast: Bob Probert, Tie Domi, Dani Probert, Stu Grimson, Don Cherry
Credits: Written and directed by Geordie Day. A DarkStar release.
Running time: 1:32
“The Goodbye Girl” is, like any modern classic, a film you not only remember seeing, you remember where and who you saw it with if you’re of a certain age.
I remember those facts because of an argument I lost.
The film’s star, Richard Dreyfuss, was in two smash hits in the winter of 1977-78. The other is an iconic science fiction picture beloved by fans of the genre as one of the smart, adult blockbusters in a playground of fantasy, action and space cowboys.
So if you were dating at the time, you had the choice to two Dreyfuss must-see movies to catch, typically not in the same day as the multi-plex was only just emerging as the new cinema model.
I wanted to see “Close Encounters,” and was waiting for date night to do it.
My girlfriend, similarly inclined, preferred “The Goodbye Girl,” a Neil Simon romance. Ok, a “chick picture,” as we said at the time. She attended a college 140 miles from the one I where I enrolled. There was a long drive involved. It was winter. It snows in the mountains of western Virginia.
But you let the lady choose the movie, in the end, right?
So Kelly and I saw “The Goodbye Girl” at the old Virginia Theatre in Harrisonburg, home to James Madison University, on a snowy evening close to Christmas in 1977.
Want a chance to connect this classic film to your own memories, a movie night to remember?
Dreyfuss is coming to the Florida Film Festival (tickets at the link) this year for a special showing of “The Goodbye Girl,” a way of celebrating his career and that of the playwright/screenwriter Neil “Doc” Simon, who scripted the role that won Dreyfuss his Oscar.
It’s at 7:30 Friday night, April 19 at the Enzian Theater in Maitland (north Orlando). You’re going to want to be there, to see one of the great screen romances of the ’70s, to catch a very funny film star on the rise, to relish the movie that spoiled Dreyfuss’s chances of ever playing “Richard III.” Because once you’ve seen his character’s director-mandated approach to the infamous sovereign in “Goodbye Girl,” you can’t see Richard III any other way.
I’m moderating a Q & A with Dreyfuss after the screening, and I hope you’ll show up with some real “Inside the Actor’s Studio” questions to add to the ones I’m planning on asking.
C’mon. The guy’s 120+ credits into a career that’s included “Tin Men,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Let it Ride,” “Stake Out,” “Whose Life is it Anyway?” and “Lost in Yonkers.” You’ve got questions. You know you do.
The creators of “Penguins,” this year’s DisneyNature Earth Day gift to moviegoers, walk a fine line between cute and “cutesie.”
The producers hired comic actor Ed Helms (“The Office,””The Hangover”) to narrate. They anthropomorphize the Adélie penguins the film is about, naming one “Steve” and his mate Adeline.
Disney has been doing this since getting into the nature documentary business in the 1940s. Who remembers “Perri the Squirrel?” Anyone?
So DisneyNature’s “Penguins” is considerably more kid-friendly than 2005’s “March of the Penguins,” a classic of the genre, and a French-made blockbuster that earned $127 million at the box office while showing the world the epic struggle of emperor penguins to survive, make and hold their own in the harshest climate on Earth — the frozen wasteland of Antarctica.
We meet Steve as he returns to the continent for the first time as an adult, a guy in the make. For a mate.
“Is she looking at me? She’s looking at ME…Annnnnd she’s walking away.”
Helms not only narrates, he takes on Steve’s interior voice as he clumsily tries to attract a female, courts and gets down to the business Adélie penguins are famous for — collecting pebbles to build a nest.
Helms gives Steve an underdog’s charm, even if it’s impossible to make the little 15 pound birds more adorable than nature already made them.
But he’s perfectly sober-voiced in describing the harsh living conditions, the steep odds and the major threats facing these small penguins, clustered in colonies during the chilly Antarctic summer.
You remember some of them from “March of the Penguins” — terrible cold, blizzards, the predatory skuas (birds) who eat their eggs and kill their young, Orcas and leopard seals.
Co-directors Alastair Fothergill (“Planet Earth,” “Chimpanzee,” “Bears”) and Jeff Wilson may play up the cute, here. But they don’t sugar coat this world, either. Having the narrator call Orcas “Killer Whales” is apt.
And if they’ve done their jobs right, their movie will show the awful consequences of leopard seal attacks. You could have heard a pin drop during those scenes — in a theater crowded with children — when the seals, working in tandem, hunt the little birds through the ice floes. Life is scary, and life in the wild doesn’t favor the cute and cuddly — an important bit of growing up movies like this should deliver.
In the years since “March of the Penguins,” cameras have gotten smaller, drones have become handy filmmaking tools and “Penguins” benefits from these advances — capturing the scale of the size of the colony and bringing us the most magnificent under-ice/underwater photography the cinema has ever seen.
“Penguins” isn’t just adorable. It is, in many moments, beautiful.
The “cute” gets to be a bit much, with “romantic” moments underscored with REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight this Feeling Any More” and Steve’s end-of-summer trip back into the sea with Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again On My Own.”
It won’t supplant “March of the Penguins.” But DisneyNature has scored another kid-friendly natural world documentary about wild creatures we all connect with and that today’s kids will grow up wanting to protect from climate change and the other man-made threats facing them.
MPAA Rating: G, some animals-in-peril moments
Cast: The voice of Ed Helms
Credits:Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jeff Wilson, script by David Fowler. A DisneyNature release.
Running time: 1:16
Now I don’t know if this Daisy Ridley/J.J. Abrams controlled “Star Wars” trilogy is going to solve its essential problems with story, pace, inclusive-casting that overreaches and cluttering the picture with extra characters –all to sell more toys and make more money in foreign markets — with this last, third film in the sequence.
But unlike with the final “Avengers,” this I can look forward to. I’m still capable of falling for the essence of cinema that makes every “Star Wars” movie a heartbeat-skipping moment of anticipation, at least as far as the trailers are concerned.
Our old friend Luke narrating, now an old man, and John Williams’ score welling up on the soundtrack, that takes you back, right back where you were when first encountered this universe.
Here it is, “Episode IX,” on its way this holiday season.
Maybe the world hasn’t been waiting with bated breath for a Canadian hockey-flavored version of “Grosse Point Blank.” But that was fun, flippant and romantic and the violence wasn’t as in-your-face as you might expect for a hit-man high school reunion comedy. So why not?
“First Round Down” shows us the possibilities in the idea, even if it hammers home the point that we’re still waiting on a good action comedy along those lines.
It’s a glib, slow and somewhat sour variation on a theme, a comedy that’s never as jaunty as that ancient Canadian ditty that plays out under the opening credits, “The Good ol’Hockey Game” by “Stompin’ Tom Connors.
The reunion this time is of a famous Hamilton, Ontario Junior team, the Steelhawks, who conjured up “the preeminent sporting event in Hamilton history” when they won The Sterling Cup. The story maintains that was ten years ago, but everybody in this thing looks as if more than ten years have passed, the vintage music and vintage cars treasured by those who lived through it are even older still.
Tom Tucker, played by Dylan Bruce of “American Gothic” and “Orphan Black,” was “the most touted junior hockey player in years” back when he wore the black and gold. But he was laid out and injured during a game, ending his career.
He’s back in town, delivering pizzas, getting the odd double take of “Didn’t you used to be” even as he isn’t landing tips. Tom looks after baby brother Matty — “It’s MATTHEW!” (Percy Hynes White) — and saves his pennies.
Tom can take up with his old drinking buddy Bobby (Rob Ramsay, funny) and get a pass from a cop (Boomer Phillips) who tries and fails to arrest him for public urination after a night of drinking.
“Bill? I thought you were just some dumb cop.”
“I AM a dumb cop. Look how fast you stole my gun!”
But the homecoming doesn’t really hit home until he delivers a pizza to his ex, Kelly (Rachel Wilson of “Republic of Doyle”).
“It’s been ten years, Tucker. Get over me.”
Maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t. And what’s he been up to during the decade he was away? Feed him a beer or two and you’ll get it out of him.
Tom, it turns out, is a careless, loose-lipped, jokey and hotheaded hit man.
“Coupla bourbons for me and the ‘Goodfella’ over here!”
The casual viewer can guess the one or two directions “First Round Down” is going just from that one character trait. But let’s play out the string, because “Hammertown” (Hamilton’s nickname) deserves no less.
The stuff that works is Tom’s general haplessness and near-embarrassment at doing this job, back in this town, remembered by these people.
His alcohol problems have him slapping pucks, at game speed, at his goalie little brother in their garage, and bellowing at kids in a game he where he and Bobby are imbibing.
Fat loser Bobby yelling, “You are a drunken f—–g mistake” at a kid hockey player on the ice? Funny.
There’s beer drunk stalking and that whole public urination incident as well, all lightly amusing aspects of his character flaw.
His anger management issues have him giving a kid a hard time for not tipping because he’s just “a front for your parents” penny-pinching ways. And then there’s the room full of tough guys who not only stiff him over his tip, but insult him and won’t even pay full price for their pie.
The best scene co-directors Brett and Jason Butler cook up and shoot is essentially a savage hockey fight, on dry land with Tom taking on three toughs, glimpsed through a half-open motel room door.
The characters and story’s actual age and proper setting are given away in a bit of casting. John Kapelos makes a memorable mark as a mob boss who has used Tom’s handiwork over the years. Kapelos is best remembered as the world-weary, cynical janitor in “The Breakfast Club.”
That was a LOT longer than ten years ago, campers.
“First Round Down” stumbles and drags long before the “First Period” (hockey-game chapters separating the segments of the story) has ended. The film, now on Amazon and other video streaming platforms, never settles into the tone that works — jokey, slapshticky.
Sentiment interrupts, with sappy solo guitar underscoring those moments. The violence is necessary to the plot, but in the quite-violent finale, it sours the picture. The whole affair would have worked better if Tom had just turned his hockey enforcer skills to mob collector work. Fists and beatings lower the stakes, but are funnier that “Two Gun Tom” hitman work.
That brawler-paid to-brawl idea better fits the story and would have made the “Grosse Pointe” ripoff less obvious.
And the film’s Canadian content might have scored more laughs, north and south of the border, had the Butlers played around with that more. I lived on the edge of Canada in North Dakota and Alaska, and the differences between the cultures are both telling and occasionally hilarious, and generations of Canadian writers, comics and actors have made their fortune finding what’s funny “up there” and selling it both at home and in the U.S.
What the filmmakers here have made instead is a movie with some moments, built on a framework that’s worked before and will work again. You just wish they’d workshopped more jokes into this script and taken their story in more amusing directions.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and profanity
Cast: Dylan Bruce, Rachel Wilson, Rob Ramsay, Peter MacNeil, Pedro Miguel Arce and Joel Thomas Hynes.
Credits: Written and directed by Brett M. Butler, Jason G. Butler. An Unobstructed View release.
Running time: 1:36
French director turned producer/mogul Luc Besson likes them young and thin.
Yes, I’m being a tad crass because, well, that is Monsieur Luc in a nutshell, his “M.O.” — “La Femme Nikita,” “Lucy,” “Columbiana,” he married his “Fifth Element” starlet, Milla Jovovich and put her in “The Messenger” (the Joan of Arc movie). “The Transporter” movies are a veritable catalog of skinny models in jeopardy.
And who did he have “Leon: The Professional” protect? Natalie Portman.
Hey, I can say this because I have interviewed Msr. Luc several times and I know this guy’s game, as well as his action-pic bonafides.
“Anna” features runway-ready Sasha Luss as the skinny-but-deadly assassin. Cillian Murphy, Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Luke Evans are also in the cast of this June 21 action sleeper.
The trailer will pin your ears back, just like “Lucy.” Only with a better actress in the title role (“Lucy 2” is in the works).
STX scored with a pretty good Civil Rights drama, “The Best of Enemies.” But the still-making-startup-mistakes studio is churning out too much s#%t like this. To be blunt, understand, and in the hopes that they set their sights higher.
The “Hellboy” reboot is a fecal matter weather event film fiasco, a gory ill-conceived debacle that drives a stake through the heart of the franchise, no matter how many post-credits “teases” the producers tack on.
For the record, there are two. For the record, you won’t want to stay all the way through those credits to see them. Unless, of course, you want to take names and troll assorted producers, stars, writers and effects crews that had the misfortune to put their names on this disaster.
Let the record also reflect that David Harbour is no Ron Perlman, the first and only big screen “Hellboy,” a crimson, de-horned, dismayed superhero from Hell. Harbour’s big and bulky, but not quite funny, no matter how many chances (not that many) the dreadful script gives him.
Still, we meet him in promising circumstances. He’s on a mission to Mexico to retrieve a rogue agent. He’s already famous. Being red and having a tail will do that for a guy.
The former colleague is now a luchador, a masked Mexican wrestler. And he’s been possessed by a demon. So Hellboy has to best him in the ring to accomplish his quest for the B.P.R.D — the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.
But hell, let’s cut to the chase. “Hellboy” goes wrong BEFORE this introductory brawl. A Pythonesque prologue, narrated by Ian McShane, takes us back to the hellish past when The Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) was beheaded by King Arthur, dismembered, her parts scattered all over England’s green and pleasant woodlands.
Hearing Jovovich, a corpseless head, scream about revenge as she’s carried off may be the funniest thing since “Tis but a FLESH wound. Have at YOU!” To complete the Monty Python reference.
The movie that follows is all foreboding, warnings (“The End is coming,” but not soon enough.), duels with giants, treacherous allies and demons out to fetch all of the Blood Queen’s body parts so she can bring about The End Times.
McShane plays the grizzled professor/agent who found Hellboy as a Hellbabe, thanks to the Nazis and Rasputin. That makes him “Dad.”
Sasha Lane (“American Honey”) is a rescuer/sidekick, Daniel Dae Kim is a fellow agent and everybody else we’ll leave out of this because, heck, they’re going to want to work again.
The fights are kind of fun, even if Harbour can’t quite pull off the world-weary profanity that showed us how perfect Perlman was in the part. Seriously, if you watched “Stranger Things” and thought, “The SHERIFF is the charismatic heavyweight we can turn into a hero,” you have more foresight than me.
Jovovich loves playing villains, but “Revenge is the only sustenance I need” doesn’t do it for evil empress of the underworld banter.
Thomas Haden Church is the only performer who gets away unscathed, a dorky, long-in-the-tooth early superhero Nazi fighter named The Lobster. He eats up corny dialogue and honks it out with style.
British director Neil Marshall usually has better luck with single-word titles — “Descent,” “Centurion.” Here, he was so dismayed at what he’d put his name on that he planted this story about what the set was like, what tools the producers were, how Harbour treated him and what a mess was made that wasn’t really his fault, says he.
Somehow, mere words describing screenwriter Andrew Cosby’s incompetence won’t do the trick. So I’ll just post a link to this.
I liked the original “Hellboy.” Not a lot, but with Perlman, David Hyde Pierce and director Guillermo del Toro, it had its moments.
The new “Hellboy” feels like the end of the road for the character and the franchise, no matter how many post-credits teases they give us, no matter how old and not-long-for-this-business the idiot producers who still own the rights, and who put this mess out there might be.
MPAA Rating:R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, and language
Cast: David Harbour, Ian McShane, Milla Jovovich, Sophie Okonedo, Thomas Haden Church, Sahsa Lane, Daniel Dae Kim
Credits:Directed by Neil Marshall, script by Andrew Cosby, based on the comic book. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:00
