From the “Bill & Ted 3” Twitter Feed
“Bill & Ted Day is totally two weeks from today! Hosting a public event for it? Let us know, dude. Events are currently scheduled to happen in multiple locations in the UK and US. And, no matter where you party on, join us online!”
https://t.co/B6fssFeIjE #BillandTed #BillandTedDay https://twitter.com/BillandTed3/status/1132742782320336898?s=17
Scorsese knows The Stones. Scorsese knows Dylan. This new doc on BD hots the streamkng service in mid June. http://www.brooklynvegan.com/bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue-documentary-is-out-in-june-see-first-stills/
Cycling buddy comedy? That could find an American audience. https://deadline.com/2019/05/the-climb-movie-cycling-comedy-sony-classics-deal-cannes-1202622085/amp/
We’re still in Kansas, Dorothy. But with “Brightburn,” we’re not in Smallville any more.
It’s a twisted take on the “Superman” origin myth, an alien baby adopted by humans in rural America, raised on “wholesome rural values,” and yet when puberty hits, he’s a monster, not an icon of “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
How’d this happen?
OK, his parents, the Breyers (Elizabeth Banks and David Denman) swear. A lot. And Dad hits the local bar. But Mom is full of reassurances that “You’ll always be my baby boy.” Can she turn him around once all this omnipotent power has gone straight to his 12-year-old head?
It’s a Screen Gems movie. What do you think?
If Screen Gems was ever going to do the “Evil Superman” picture, it was always going to be a horror film. And yeah, it was going to be cut-rate.
“Brightburn” is a blood-spattered wallow in extra-terrestrial cruelty, a child who has it pretty good discovering he dropped to Earth in a spaceship, and thus is even more “special” than he thought. That moment he figures out his super-strength, that he can’t hurt his hand in the running lawnmower he’s just tossed two football fields away, little Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) has his mission.
“Take the Earth.”
Brightburn, Kansas? Well a boy’s got to start somewhere.
There are parables aplenty just dangling here — low-hanging fruit for screenwriter/brothers Mark and Brian Gunn, not the only Gunns in the movie-writing business, but certainly the ones with the least to offer (“Journey 2” was their big credit).
They do nothing with the notion of entitled, indulged kids, or ADHD kids, or rural Red State values imprinted on a new Superman, who brings down destruction upon us all, or great power handed to the worst possible character to wield it.
That’s all here, but not developed.
All we’re given is instance after instance of unspeakable, gruesomely-detailed cruelty — drawn out small town murders carried out by a boy whose initials match those of his town and obsess him; a boy who can fly, shoot laser beams out of his eyes and who has no compunction about using those powers to answer every slight or perceived slight.
I guess we’re lucky he doesn’t tweet.
“Brightburn” is a generally humorless affair, with the only “laughs” given a sadistic edge, with paint-by-numbers frights and cut-and-paste “big emotional moments” that even the formidable Banks cannot make pay off.
Another horror movie about a soul-dead child who excuses monstrous behavior with “Sometimes bad things happen to people for a good reason” is nothing to to buy a ticket for.
The scares are built out of how fast the little Dickens is, the creepy mask and cape getup he comes up with, the “powers” he has. But editor-turned-director David Yarovesky doesn’t give them any juice, and can’t be bothered to make more than one of them a surprise.
It’s not hatefully bad, just inert. Botched. Dull. Pointless.
MPAA Rating: R for horror violence/bloody images, and language.
Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Emmie Hunter and Gregory Alan Williams
Credits: Directed by David Yarovesky, script by Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn. A Sony/Screen Gems release.
Running time: 1:31
It’s a widely embraced truism that it’s a bloody miracle any of us who grew up in the ’70s got out alive. It was as true Down Under as it was here in the Northern Hemisphere.
It wasn’t just the banana hammocks, leisure suits, sideburns, deathtrap cars, promiscuity, booze, saccharine in our soft drinks, saccharine pop music, drugs and disco that menaced us.
“We were the first generation to wear fully synthetic fabrics,” an all-wise narrator reminds us. “We were also…the last,” he adds, showing off the burn scars he and a 14 year-old friend wear. Thanks to such “progress,” and bad parenting, “Melly and I were ‘the flammable children.'”
“Swinging Safari” is an unruly, unsettling and shambolic romp through a ’70s childhood in Australia. It’s from the director of “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” and if it’s not autobiographical, that can only come as a relief. Not that his protagonist, an aspiring tweenage filmmaker named Jeff (Atticus Robb), remembers this near-disastrous experiment in free-range parenting, ‘safety not guaranteed” child’s play and “swinging” that way.
Stephan Elliott conjures up the lost world of Wyong Place, an idyllic split-level slice of Aussie suburbia on the edge of Nobby’s Beach. It’s where three families and their kids played, drank, experimented and somehow cheated the impending death that seems to hang over their every activity.
“Wedged in time somewhere between ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Wall Street,'” (circa 1975, I figure), we meet the “House of Hall,” “There’s No Place Like Jones” and “Life on Marsh” families in postcard screen-caps from little Jeff’s super eight movies.
Hey, if you wanted to learn to make “foreign cinema” like “Jaws” in the ’70s, you had to have a “super power, super weapon, super eight camera.” And Jeff isn’t just capturing the chaotic home life and cringe-worthy play of these families. He was making movies under his “Death Cheaters” banner — DIY credits, DIY effects (papier mache volcanos) and all-too-real DIY stunts.
Mini-bikes, trampolines and unsupervised fireworks aren’t enough. Jeff’s camera gives him the power to talk other kids into doing pretty much anything he wants. Neighbor boy Gerome (Jesse Denyer) already has a full Evel Knievel suit. Douse him with gas for a fire stunt?
“It’s perfectly safe!”
“Ready when you are, CB!”
The movies they’re making; “Jaws 2, Humans 0,” “The Revengers” and “Dead Sorry in the Morning” among them, are a cringe-worthy hoot. We keep waiting for somebody to blow up, burn to death, drown or at least poke an eye out.
“You aren’t gonna get burned, Gerome is!”
What the parents are doing instead of paying attention to their kids is amusingly appalling. Neighbor mom Kaye (Kylie Minogue) is all but confined to their house, drinking. “Agoraphobia, like skin cancer and political correctness, hadn’t been invented yet.”
Her husband (Guy Pearce) is trying to house, feed and entertain his brood selling Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedias door to door, or by phone, holed up in the basement where he keeps his porn magazines.
“Yes, I’m a wanker! And I’ve got the dirty magazines to prove it!”
Radha Mitchell, slinging her native Oz accent for a change, and Julian McMahon are the high-flying, pill-popping, over-spending, one-upping Joneses. Their rambunctious kids include one shrinking violet, Melissa (Imogen Hess). She’s sensitive, “invisible,” and only sensitive Jeff really sees her.
Jeff’s own parents (Asher Keddie, Jeremy Sims) are merely the best of a very bad lot, and that’s not taking into account the absurdly promiscuous teenage daughter (Chelsea Glaw) they’re not-quite-raising.
Elliott is a filmmaker drawn to the extravagant, and “Swining Safari” is overstuffed with it, from the mayhem of the movies Jeff makes to the violent play of the “rumpus room” where kids were confined during parties, and on to the “swinging” that takes place downstairs, among the seemingly consenting adults.
The film takes its title from the “Swingin’ Safari” LP German orchestra leader Bert Kaempfert and his biggest flute-trio hit had in the ’60s. That’s a pun for the “key party” swinging that the couples turn their fondue party into, with Kaempfert’s gloriously square instrumentals contrasting with the destructive behavior they’re set to.
As for symbolism, well Nobby’s Beach has a great blue whale wash up on it, “trapped here, rotting, just like us” Melly assures Jeff. They have to get out, and they’re the only ones who know it.
There’s a bemused dread hanging over “Swinging Safari” (opening in the US June 21), with everything from leaving kids to bake in a hot car to “teach a lesson” to them to dangerously pointy beach umbrellas to every insanely dangerous thing “my stunt man” is put through for Death Cheaters productions.
The kids are amusingly crass and clueless, stepping on jellyfish for kicks, cruelly misusing each other and having accidents with their pets. But the great pleasure in the picture is the way Pearce, Minogue, McMahon and the other adults hurl themselves into the vulgarity of it all.
The only big laughs are sight gags, with Mitchell’s insults hurled while she’s wearing one of those Vita Master Exercise Machine belts standing out.
“Do-o-o-on’t ma-a-a-ke me la-a-a-augh!”
But Elliott has fun, as we do, snickering and rolling our eyes at the insane nonsense we believed, practiced and indulged in way back when.
When another kid cracks, “Geez, I wish I had parents like yours,” Elliott and his fellow survivors can only grin and shake our heads.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and some underage drinking
Cast: Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Radha Mitchell, Julian McMahon, Asher Keddie, Jeremy Sims
Credits: Written and directed by Stephan Elliott. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:36
SOMEbody got off cheap. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48393721
If you’ve wondered how this feel good musical crossed that most difficult financial bridge, as I have, Billboard has the answer. https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/columns/pop/8512779/danny-boyle-yesterday-the-beatles-interview
The warning signs were in plain sight.
Sailors were bartering to pay for necessities, including the booze for a shipmates’ wedding, because Mother Russia wasn’t meeting payroll.
Maintenance had fallen by the board, and not just on ships mothballed because they couldn’t afford to send them to sea.
Scrambling to get the Northern Fleet into a major military exercise didn’t take into account what the crews, and officers, hadn’t been drilled in — for years — to keep themselves and their vessels safe.
And then a hydrogen peroxide/kerosene-powered torpedo gets “angry,” and the rigid chain of command doesn’t respond well to emergencies.
“All in good time,” we hear one elderly admiral purr to concerned families of the submarine “Kursk.” Of course, by this time the massive submarine, pride of the Russian Navy, was sitting on the bottom of the Barents Sea, its nose blown off. Official indifference put them there, the populace’s famous Russian fatalism would play right into that. Or so officialdom (Max Von Sydow) thought.
“The Command” is a Western account of the 2000 disaster, a harrowing but routine thriller released as “Kursk” in Europe (now on DirectTV and in North American theaters June 21).
French super-producer Luc Besson ensures that the cast and effects are first rate, and Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Hunt,””The Celebration”) summons up as much suspense as he can for a tragedy in which most viewers will remember how it came out.
The narrative is heavily fictionalized, with the screenwriter slapping the names of Russian skaters and dancers on some naval characters. It’s based on Robert Moore’s book on the disaster, “A Time to Die,” and follows three threads.
Matthias Schoenaerts is Mikhail, a petty officer aboard “Kursk” with an adoring son (Artemiy Spiridonov) and a loving, very pregnant wife (Léa Seydoux). Mikhail’s biggest concerns before putting to sea is gathering the booze for a shipmate/pal’s rowdy weepy Russian Orthodox wedding, which he secures from corrupt quartermasters.
Admiral Grudzinskty (Peter Simonischek) is the leader of the Northern Fleet, on the bridge of his flag ship for the first fleet exercises since the fall of the U.S.S.R. He grouses about the state of the ships, and the size of deployment, even if a subordinate boasts they are “more than enough to send a message to our enemies.
“Now all we have to do is figure out who our enemies are.” In the movies, this is what the “good Russians” say.
And Colin Firth is the British commodore in charge of monitoring this exercise from afar, via observer subs and deep sea listening devices. Commodore Russell doesn’t hear the torpedoman’s warning call to the captain, that the no-warhead “practice” torpedo they’re set to use is leaking its igniter chemical into its fuel.
“It is angry, sir.”
Russell doesn’t hear that concern brushed off, and the crew members muttering “Say your prayers” to each other, nor does he hear the “I am not a religious…” before the inevitable happens.
But Russell and his team hear the “BOOM” when the five ton “dummy” weapon blows up, the crunch when the sub plunges to the bottom and the even more massive explosion that follows minutes later.
Only men in an aft compartment survive the blast and flooding. Mikhail, Oleg (Magnus Millang) and a few others must scramble to stabilize their flooding compartment, get a pump running and tap on the hull to get the fleet’s attention.
The admiral and his men on the surface have to figure out what’s happened and process a response.
But over in Britain, Commodore Russell & Co. are way ahead of them, pretty much for the rest of the movie.
“Mother of God. They’ve lost a submarine!”
Too much of what the world knows about the disaster has been filtered through an unreliable Russian investigation and cover-up, and some dramatic license is to be expected in a movie with European stars and financing, and the need to condense the “ticking clock” race to save the men in the stern of the huge boat.
The chronology is flawed as to who knew what and when, and who offered to help first, and the film is too eager to put fake names on characters, too eager to allow that fictionalization to move to the fore.
But there is dramatic underwater free-diving repair footage as Mikhail and his men struggle to buy themselves more time. We get truthful if not precisely accurate accounts of a secretive military culture and government given to hiding everything from its people struggling to “contain” this crisis, stalling and harrumphing in bursts of Cold War paranoia.
And there is pathos, a crackling intercom conversation between the aft compartment and the nuclear reactor crew — “We can’t leave, or it’s Chernobyl!” A little boy asks his mother, “Is Dad dead?”
“The Command” plays down the whopper that the Russians insisted on repeating, time and again, that a NATO (American) submarine had collided with theirs, causing the disaster. It sanitizes or seems to absolve some of the chain of command, and utterly ignores the PR disaster that new-“president” Vladimir Putin presided over. He was on vacation for much of this.
But we do see the worried wives and children ignore their elders’ gullible counsel, “We let the Navy do its work…Their comrades will do their duty. Your duty is to wait at home.”
We see the infamous “official” reaction to a near riot that broke out with that crowd (Putin was present for this).
And in this case, that’s enough to remind us that unlike that Russian admiral, unlike the generally cowed and complaint populace, unlike the alleged “Leader of the Free World,” we remember who our enemies are — their lies, paranoia, clumsiness and venality, systemic and endemic, that have made them our ideological foes for a century.
It’s not a classic of the genre, not moving enough to truly grip the viewer and pull us to the edge of our seats. But a very good cast and a general respect for the facts makes “The Command” a worthy-enough entry, one that realizes sometimes there is no happy ending.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense disaster-related peril and disturbing images, and for brief strong language
Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux, Peter Simonischek, Colin Firth and Max Von Sydow
Credits: Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, script by Robert Rodat based on the Robert Moore book. A Saban Films/DirectTV release.
Running time: 1:57
This one sounded fishy from the outset.
https://www.thewrap.com/geoffrey-rush-awarded-1-9-million-in-metoo-defamation-case/
“In the Aisles” is a lovely German elegy to the nobility of work and the family we create while working. It’s a quiet, insightful idyll set in the world of modern retail, seen from the ground level — literally.
Perhaps they don’t call them “groβe kiste” stores in Germany. But they’re the same “big box” warehouses that we find in much of the world — cavernous, dark, bulk-buy discount stores built for bargain hunters.
That’s where Christian, played by Franz Rogowski (“Transit,””A Hidden Life”) finds himself, a young man with a lot of tattoos and a new job — “night stocker.”
Christian is warned about wearing “long sleeves” over his tattoos, is issued his work smock and “our basic kit” like a soldier sent into battle — four pens, a box cutter, and his name tag, and taken to “the hallowed halls.”
He apprentices under the grumpy “I don’t need any help” Bruno (Peter Kurth, sort of the muse of director Thomas Stuber). They prowl the after-hours aisles, loading beer kegs and pasta, crates of liquor and the like from the top shelves onto the bottom ones, where customers can pluck them during the next day’s shopping hours.
Bruno starts Christian on the long path towards getting a forklift license and becoming really useful there. All the “newbie” has to do is “take it real slow.” That goes for almost everybody there, the pharmacy director who plays chess with Bruno on his many, long breaks, older guys not paid enough to be in a hurry, at this stage.
Then there’s “Sweet Goods Marion” (Sandra Hüller, co-star of “Toni Erdmann”). A cocky, slightly older coquette, she breaks rules, flits about on her forklift and flirts with the shy Christian every time they have to stock a shelf together, or find their coffee breaks coincide.
Is she going to affect his work ethic, make him careless? Bruno seems to think so, because she’s married and now he’s “forklifting like a madman because you’re in love.”
Christian, of course, also has a past. He has to wear long sleeves to hide it.
There’s just enough chemistry between the winsome, vulnerable Hüller and Rogowski, who has a soulful, secretive and perhaps dangerous sort of Joaquin Phoenix presence. But that’s not really what Stuber’s (“A Heavy Heart”) movie is about, any more than it is about Christian, Bruno, Rudi or Marion’s pasts.
It begins with “The Blue Danube” at dawn, a waltz of forklifts greeting the day in this world of eternal florescent lighting. The shift manager, world-weary Rudi (Andreas Leupold) changes the store music when the last customer has exited — Barber’s mournful “Adagio for Strings.”
“Welcome to the night!” he says (in German, with English subtitles).
And as the evening winds down into early, early morning, with Bruno grumping “That’ll do, you pass” to every little thing Christian masters during his company probation, they clock-out and Rudi shakes the hand of each and every employee as they head out the door.
The department stockrooms have nicknames, “Siberia” for frozen foods, “The Ocean” for fresh seafood. And not all departments get along as well as Bruno in booze and coughing Irina in sweets. There’s all this bickering over forklifts, for starters.
“We don’t get along with ‘canned goods.’ With ‘sweets,’ we’re fine. They’re on a friendly warpath with ‘gourmet foods’ and ‘frozen goods.'”
They gossip, with everybody offering advice about “Sweet Goods Marion.” They have a Christmas cookout out back with food fetched from the “expired today” discards. And as dreary as the work is, as isolating as their hours make them, they look out for each other. Or try to.
Stuber’s understated, slow-moving drama nicely captures the world of overnight jobs, the perils of “semi-skilled” work (a forklift can kill you) and the loneliness that is both an on-the-job hazard and a German stereotype.
There’s a sad romance to the late hours, a poetry and music to the routine and nobility in taking pride — if that’s the word — in a menial, repetitive job competently done. Stuber takes the time to closely observe the choreography of this world, the shortcuts and “tricks of the trade” that the veteran employees willingly pass on. He celebrates work and “work family” and even the piquant concept of “work wife” in “In the Aisles.”
You don’t have to have done this sort of work or kept these hours to appreciate just how much this movie gets right, lives that have moved beyond “quiet desperation” or ambition, floating into a myopic netherworld of routine.
But I guarantee you’ll never stroll through Costco blithely and blindly again.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking, some nudity
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Sandra Hüller, Peter Kurth, Andreas Leupold
Credits: Directed by Thomas Stuber, script by Clemens Meyer and Thomas Stuber. A Music Box release.
Running time: 2:05
