Actors are always encouraged to “make work for yourself” — start a theater group, put on shows, write a story with a plum part in it for yourself.
So there’s no such thing as a “vanity project” in that world, not in a general sense.
Still, when you’ve written yourself that part, when the film is self-distributed, and when there’s a young woman in the cast with the same surname (His daughter?) as the character actor who co-scripted himself a leading role, well…
“King of Knives” is a melancholy late-midlife crisis holiday comedy built around Gene Pope. If you’ve ever seen him in anything, you might’ve thought “Oh, he’s Mark Ruffalo’s older brother.”
Pope plays a well-heeled 60something ad-man whose biggest gripe is losing an account because a younger colleague has “rebranded” the mascot of a toilet paper company client. Sammy the Squirrel has gone “urban.” Yeah, it’s offensive.
Frank’s biggest fear is that he’ll be canned for that, or for being old in a profession that loves “young.” And he’s still making payments on that Maserati convertible.
There’s the hint of something sad, a loss, that happened not that long ago in Frank’s life. It’s his wedding anniversary, and there’s a family party. So on this day, of all days, he decides to be late getting home, stopping to smoke himself a J on the way.
His buttoned-down daughter (Emily Bennett) might not approve. Kaitlin, her just-go-with-it-sister (Roxi Pope) laughs it off. Kathy, his wife? You haven’t lived until you’ve heard prim, earth momma Mel Harris of TV’s “thirtysomething” deliver this insult.
“I don’t want you driving high.” “YOU do!” “Yeah, but I handle that s–t better than you do!”
The “loss,” which everybody dances around, was of Danny, the other adult child in their family. And over the course of a weekend, Frank and Kathy — mostly Frank — will deal with all that’s gone wrong, their part in it and “Where does life take us from here?”
The “holiday” ingredients are mostly a suburban neighbor’s over-the-top Christmas decor. Frank gets blitzed and buzzed and talks a would-be groom out of the “trap” of marrying his wife’s niece — at their engagement party. He begs his way into a Bushwick (Brooklyn) party Kaitlin’s been invited to, gets drunker and hits on her (girl)friend Darla (Kara Young) and then submits to a sensitive sprite’s (Justin Sams) offer of a tarot card reading.
That scene is touching, life-altering for Frank, and gives the film its title. Frank is a sad soul braced for a cruel world, the King of Knives (Swords, actually). Frank starts to take action and take responsibility for his mistakes, sort of.
There are single scene grace notes in this that almost make it worth your while. Frank meeting the woman who hosted that party the next day, an athletic and sexy aerialist who shows off her trade (the Spanish Web), Frank having half-hearted heart-to-hearts with his daughters and wife.
It’s not a bad movie, even if there isn’t a lot to it or Pope’s laid-back, roll-(stoned)-with- the-punches performance — even if there’s a whiff of “vanity project” about this “write a good part for myself” indie dramedy.
Hey, it’s better than being confused for Mark Ruffalo’s older brother.
MPA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Gene Pope, Mel Harris, Roxi Pope, Justin Sams, Emily Bennett and Kara Young.
Credits: Directed by Jon Delgado, script by Lindsay Joy, Gene Pope. A Pope III release.
Argentina’s troubled past is the backdrop of a lifelong personal connection to “The German Friend,” a romantic drama from Argentine filmmaker Jeanine Meerapfel.
It’s about a Jewish girl who becomes infatuated with her new neighbor in 1940s Buenos Aires, a relationship that takes them both through decades of Argentine shame and activism.
Sulamit, played by Julieta Vetrano as a child and Celeste Cid into adulthood, is quite taken with Friedrich (Juan Francisco Rey, later Max Riemelt) when he and his family move in across the street. It may be the fact that he’s blond, or that he has a cute dog.
When that dog is taken by the dog catcher, she tries to get her parents to help recover it. But they’re a little leery of the Burgs. Yes, the neighbors speak German as well as Spanish, like the Lownesteins. But Dad (Jean Pierre Noher) goes so far as to snub them in the street.
To Sulamit — who has to go by “Susana” on official forms in Peronist Argentina — “He’s Argentine, just like me.”
The parents tolerate the kids’ budding friendship, Sulamit’s eagerness to celebrate Christmas with the Burgs instead of Chanukah with friends and relatives at home, Friedrich’s “soul mate” connections to the “interesting girl” his parents allow him to take up with.
Friedrich figures things about his family out as he gets older. And as he turns against them and against the ideas they represented — fascism was still in full flower in South America well into the 1960s — he becomes an activist and then a revolutionary.
Sulamit shares that enthusiasm, writing radical pieces for the school newspaper in their early college years (and beaten up for it), following Friedrich to Germany where his 1960s radicalization is completed.
Meerapfel makes the relationship the heart of the story, and then loses track of it for several stretches. The tale is told mostly from Sulamit’s point of view, quarreling with her parents (Noemí Frenkel plays her mother) over her devotion to Friedrich, who seems more devoted to “The Cause” than her by the time they’re studying in Germany.
Radical political action turns to violence as The State — many states — start responding in kind during the Castro/Che era. Sulamit finds herself in the meetings where the “revolution” is talked up, and at later meetings with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — women protesting children who “disappeared” in 1960s and ’70s Argentina.
The film is inelegantly-framed within a train trip Sulamit takes later in life, and she remembers the ebb and flow of their love affair on her journey. The characters may be archetypes, but they’re vividly played by the leads, turned into flesh-and-blood representatives of their generation in those turbulent years.
This 2012 film, new to video, isn’t a lost masterpiece. There’s very little of the “history” that plays out behind our lovers actually shown on screen. But “The German Friend” still manages to tell a compelling love story showing a generation rejecting much of what their parents represented, loving each other and “the struggle” almost equally as they grew up in an age when disillusions died hard and the generation gap was never wider.
MPA Rating: Unrated, violence, nudity, sex
Cast: Celeste Cid, Max Riemelt, Benjamin Sadler, Hartmut Becker, Noemí Frenkel and Jean Pierre Noher
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. A Corinth Films release.
A romantic comedy built around these two seems…dicey. He has no screen presence and she’s yet to prove she’s more than a pair of model’s eyebrows. But here we go.
The limp is pronounced, the crazy eyes pop out here and there. But the twitchy-tic that has long been cinema-speak for “cracking?” That’s implied, more something you feel than what Aaron Eckhart actually shows the camera in “Wander.” Because you can’t have a “paranoid thriller” without the hero’s paranoia.
Eckhart gives a tour de force turn as an ex-cop and conspiracy podcast co-host who chases a case to a desert town named Wander where an awful lot of what he’s believed all this time seems to be proven true.
It’s a solid enough thriller about video “monitoring,” implanted tracking/controlling chips, “compromised” phones and people who die from bullet wounds, but without the bullet. That’s all part and parcel of the “Deep Web Podcast” that Arthur and his accomplice Jimmy (Tommy Lee Jones) run from the remote travel trailers “compound” they’ve named “Middle of Nowhere.”
“Big Brother” and “MK-Ultra” and the “Illuminati” and “White Sands/Alamogordo” dominate their nightly ramblings in this a world they and their listeners have checked out of, a world out of time woven in a dark web they unravel for eager listeners.
Arthur’s a guy living in flashbacks, broken by the night two years ago when a car crash killed his daughter. He keeps her fortune cookie fortune in a Lucite block dangling from his keychain. His wife was rendered catatonic and left in full-time nursing home care. Arthur is the walking wounded, getting “worked up” by Jimmy, given a little private eye work by a lawyer (Heather Graham) who might be his sister-in-law.
A young woman’s execution is what drew Arthur to Wander, where he decorates his motel room in that photos-and-newsclippings “connect the dots” style favored by the movie investigators and copied by the “Beautiful Mind” crowd. He digs around, breaking into the morgue, getting anonymous tips, having his worst fears confirmed at every turn.
We remember, even if he doesn’t, Jimmy’s podcast mantra about the way “whistle-blowers” like them wind up — “pawn, patsy or dead.“
Is he onto something here? Was he “lured?” When you live by “There ARE no coincidences,” anything is possible.
The cast is top notch across the board, with Kathryn Winnick and Raymond Cruz as vivid caricature versions of a town medical examiner and sheriff.
Director April Mullen’s film doesn’t hide its secrets well enough (note the vehicles) and makes more of the story’s politics than the film delivers. The actress-turned-director is Canadian Anishinaabe Algonquin with mostly TV credits and does well by this simple yet convoluted story.
Tom Doiron’s first produced script lapses into a long series of over-explained “expository endings” which spoil the mystery of what’s come before.
But Eckhart reminds us of how good he can be when given a showy role, and a supporting cast worthy of his talents.
MPA Rating: R, violence
Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Tommy Lee Jones, Heather Graham, Kathryn Winnick, Raymond Cruz
Credits: Directed by April Mullen, script by Tim Doiron. A Saban Films release.
Ambitious, sprawling, sluggish and bland, “Stand!” is a Canadian musical about Winnipeg’s general strike of 1919.
The director of “Stomp the Yard” can’t get this stagey, stodgy and history-set-to-song up on its feet any more than the screenwriters can turn a this story about immigrants and veterans, sweatshop-laboring women and foundry and dairy-working men, whites and Natives and African Americans finding common cause for one brief moment into a coherent, compelling narrative.
And a generally underwhelming cast, playing an array of archetypes, can’t animate it.
I used to live just south of Winnipeg, and drove up a few times to a city known for its hockey, Randy Bachman and jelly donuts. This “general strike” isn’t something you hear about in American history textbooks. Like strikes broken up by soldiers in West Virginia and Colorado in the same era, it’s too big a deal to be ignored like that.
The story threads follow father-son Ukranian immigrants Mike (screen veteran Gregg Henry) and Stefan (Marshall Williams) as they slave away for low WWI wages to earn enough to book the rest of the family passage to the city, fleeing “the Bolsheviks.”
Stefan is smitten by a Jewish neighbor (Laura Wiggins) in their tenement. Rebecca and her brother Moeshe (Tristan Carlucci) are labor organizers, agitating in a time of postwar unrest.
White “English” veterans — and a First Nation vet (Gabriel Daniels) — are returning from World War I to no jobs and low wages for the ones to be had. Discontent was widespread, but immigrants feared deportation and all feared violence.
And the “Citizen’s Committee” of capitalist power-brokers (Paul Essiembre, Blake Taylor) was quick throw those threats out there.
Troops deployed or deploying themselves to intimidate workers, goons hired, cops whose loyalties shift back and forth, a government pushed to change laws overnight to make protesting and striking illegal, racism and anti-Semitism dividing the strikers — that’s a lot to cover in a film. And every so often, a song comes up.
The tunes, by Danny Schur, rhyming “immigration” and “cancellation,” lamenting that sweat-shop sewing is where “repetition promotes attrition,” have to carry plot and do almost all of the emotional heavy lifting.
They aren’t up to it. A riot is lamented in a feeble ballad, “This Saturday in June.” Others decry racism or plot their villainy in tunes that are forgotten before they’ve concluded.
Director Robert Adetuyi’s camera is mostly static. As there are no production numbers to speak of, some movement and whizbang editing is desperately needed to give the film pace, raise the stakes, pump up the passions and give the story the urgency that the flat performances and tepid tunes do not.
The “dramatic climax,” and its climactic song don’t do justice to the phrase.
I was reminded of several boilerplate historical regional musicals I’ve seen and reviewed on the stage over the years. I never saw “Strike!,” the stage show that it’s based on. But middling songs can convey more power in live performance, and a show about local history always generates more local interest and enthusiasm.
“Stand!” has great historical underpinnings and potential universal appeal in its messages and its take on the labor and immigrant experiences. But as a labor musical, it feels “small town.” It should never have been dragged off the stage and filmed. It’s strictly a Winnipeg thing.
MPA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Laura Wiggins, Gregg Henry, Marshall Williams, Hayley Sales, Gabriel Daniels, Tristan Carlucci, Blake Taylor, Paul Essiembre
Credits: Directed by Robert Adetuyi, script by Rick Chafe, Danny Schur, music and lyrics by Danny Schur. A Fathom Events release, in theaters Dec. 1.
A “buddy picture” is a lot like a romantic comedy. The “couple” must clash, bicker or even box each other’s ears, and do it adorably. Their arguments should snap, the more stinging the wit the better.
And the leads? They absolutely positively have to have chemistry.
“Half Brothers” is a bilingual buddy picture/road comedy that fails to tick off the check boxes, starting with chemistry and stumbling through attempted jokes. And then it turns all sentimental, as if that too-sappy/too-late twist will save it.
It’s a PG-13 effort from the director of “Let’s Be Cops,” and plays like it — start to finish. Luke Greenfield seems as at a loss about how to make this funnier as he did directing Rob Schneider’s PG-13 bomb “The Animal.” This feels half-hearted, muzzled. And it’s not the least bit amusing.
Renato (Luis Gerardo Méndez) is a Mexican aircraft manufacturing tycoon who’s triggered every time somebody mentions the United States. Suggest he “expand into the US” and you’ll get an earful about “ignorant,” prejudiced, “entitled…and fat” Americans.
He has his reasons. He had a Dad (Juan Pablo Espinosa) who doted on him, built him radio-controlled airplanes even. Then the ’90s currency collapse sent Dad hiking north for work in the US. He never came home. Renato never even heard from him.
Then Dad’s American wife (Ashley Poole) tells him his father is dying. Renato reluctantly leaves his fiance (Pia Watson) and flies to Chicago, where the old man half-apologizes and, being fond of riddles, leaves his son a dying clue — “Eloise” — to explain his life.
He leaves it to his two sons, actually. That redheaded dolt Renato stumbled into in a doughnut shop? The one who so enraged him that the rich guy bought all the doughnuts so that the jerk and other “fat Americans” couldn’t have any? That’s Asher (Connor Del Rio).
Renato is more than happy to fume his way back home, his “duty” to an estranged parent done. But the fiance’ figures he could learn a few things about patience and parenting from a cross-country search for clues with the childish Asher. Renato will have a stepson after he gets married.
Renato is an aeronautical engineer. Asher is a “lazy America” stereotype, clueless about how clueless he is, mispronouncing words left and right, as a barista named “Beat Rice” (Beatrice) can attest.
Their odyssey, taken in Asher’s ancient orange ethanol-repowered Mercedes wagon, will lead them to old acquaintances of their father, from a pawn shop to convent, with Asher committing one “screw up” after another along the way.
He slips off to visit a petting zoo/goat farm, and swipes a kid, prompting irate farmers to rain shotgun pellets upon them.
“Where ELSE are you going to see goats wandering around, free?”
“I don’t know! ALL of MEXICO?”
“Hey, stop BRAGGING about Mexico!”
At every stop of their journey, they learn more about their father, the “reasons” for him abandoning his family and why he had no patience for his second son. The screenwriters, reaching for maudlin sentiment, never for one second make that case for him.
The early goat theft — they keep it for the trip — promises a more madcap romp than this script provides. I grinned at a little of the culture-clash stuff. It’s just that there’s VERY little of that. The slapstick promised by encounters with redneck bullies and the like doesn’t develop. At all.
Méndez, seen in the last “Charlie’s Angels” remake and Mexico’s “Cantinflas” bio-pic, works up a fine lather as the irate straight man here. But Del Rio, a veteran of the “Key and Peele” sketch comedy series, goes for Zach Galifianakis-annoying here. But he isn’t comic enough to turn a dull script witty and can’t make his scenes with Méndez set off sparks.
I’d say “Half Brothers” half works, but that’s unjustifiably generous.
MPA Rating: PG-13 for some violence and strong language
Cast: Luis Gerardo Méndez, Connor Del Rio, Pia Watson, Vincent Spano, José Zúñiga, Bianca Marroquin, Ashley Poole and Juan Pablo Espinosa
Credits: Directed by Luke Greenfield, script by Jason Shuman and Eduardo Cisneros. A Focus Features release.
The opening voice-over narration of “Elyse” has a clumsy “English as a Second Language” wince about it.
“People would rather live in homes, regardless of its grayness.” “‘If we walk far enough,’ says Dorothy, “we shall sometime come to someplace.”
But the title character in this Stella Hopkins film is quoting from “The Wizard of Oz.” So you can’t blame the director and co-writer, wife of Anthony Hopkins, for the clunky usages.
The clumsy efforts at marrying a story of mental breakdown and treatment with L. Frank Baum’s children’s parable of 19th century monetary policy? That’s on Stella.
And yes, every other clunky line is hers. Even if she didn’t write them, she approved them. Every pretentious, empty directorial flourish — black and white scenes with splashes of color here and there — every amateurish performance, every second of this dithering, dull and pointless affair can be parked at Mrs. Hopkins’ feet.
Only her husband, playing the psychotherapist summoned to treat the bipolar/borderline personality disorder and possibly alcoholic “spoiled, entitled narcissistic little brat,” acquits himself with his usual immersive professional aplomb.
He’s indulged her — that’s the only word for it — and she’s parked her Oscar-winning spouse in a singular debacle, 94 minutes of almost uninterrupted ineptitude of a first-year-film-school-student level.
Elyse (Lisa Pepper, not good) is a rich lawyer’s (Aaron Tucker, dull) wife, daughter of “a lying b—h” of a mother (Fran Tucker, embarrassingly bad), mother of a nannied little boy, is unhappy and unstable, and the last one to realize it.
That first visit to Dr. Lewis (Hopkins) is shrouded in shadows and meanders between revelations, “Jungian or Freudian,” and discussions of the art of illustrator Maxfield Parrish.
And then Elyse, she of vivid dreams and hallucinatory idylls while she’s awake, gets drunk and breaks down. She’s catatonic, and not just over the party.
A hospital, medication and electroshock therapy are on the menu.
Inane snippets of conversation, an over-sharing reverie by a French-American (male) nurse, brittle, off-putting and stiff performances seemingly molded from single-use plastic, a story that goes nowhere and does so at an excruciating pace — “Elyse” is a quiet, shiny and empty catastrophe.
At least there’s a badly-scripted dream-memory of a trip to Joshua Tree by vintage MGA roadster back when Elyse was pregnant. The car is lovely. The light and staging? Incompetent.
And at least this won’t be the great Anthony Hopkins’ last film. “The Father” is due out in a couple of weeks. By then, this will be passed off as a husband’s Christmas present to a spouse out of her depth.
MPA Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Lisa Pepper, Anthony Hopkins, Aaron Tucker, Tara Arroyave, Julieta Ortiz and Fran Tucker
Credits: Directed by Stella Hopkins, script by Stella Hopkins and Audrey Arkins. A Margam release.
Every film in Steve McQueen’s five-film series “Small Axe” has interesting characters, and a couple of them are strictly character-driven.
But it’s the milieu and the passing parade of history — real events, pivotal moments in British social justice — that grabbed me. And the further I get into it, the more convinced I am that the whole enterprise is best appreciated in a weekend long binge. Get through “Mangrove,” the densely-packed two hour opener. Adjust your ears to the dialect, the storytelling style and the overarching themes — Londoners from Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada and The Bahamas overcoming virulent racism to become a vital part of British culture — and the later films just float by on a curry-scented Caribbeans-in-London breeze.
“Alex Wheatle,” the penultimate film, is about a much-honored British writer who overcame an orphaned childhood spent in the child welfare system, prejudice and imprisonment to find his voice and his place as one of his generation’s greatest authors of children’s and young adult fiction.
We meet Alex, born “Alfonso” (riveting screen newcomer Sheyi Cole) on incarceration day. He is shocked and sullen, a skinny waif settling into a cell with a friendly, helpful but oh-so-smelly convict he calls “a nasty rasta” (Robbie Gee, terrific).
As the kid lashes out at his new circumstances in rage, the great bear of a cellmate, the Rastafarian Simeon literally hugs the hate out of him.
“My ears is fully woken,” he says. Tell me your story and “start at the beginning.”
We see the abusive foster care Alfonso endured, the staid conformist attire and dialect he emerged from that system with, and his total immersion in all things Caribbean when he emerges, “on the dole” (“G-checks”) as a teen, taking a room in Brixton.
There’s something to be said for watching this entire series of movies with the subtitles on, which wouldn’t spoil Alfonso’s first meeting with his first mentor, the beret-bedecked hipster Dennis (Jonathan Jules, a delight). The kid is as mystified by the slangy, musical patois as any newcomer would be, as indeed any North American must be.
But not to worry. Dennis will set him up. First, get him out of those “PVC” clothes. I have no more idea what he means than Alfonso did.
A big step? “Learning the proper Black man’s strut…You always hunching like a Storm Trooper hunting the Jedi. You got to be the JEDI hunting the Storm Trooper!”
As the kid masters that, the dialect and getting by — “G-checks” and selling “a little kush” — he finds his first outlet, DJing.
And as all this is going on, the culture clash/racial-strife history we saw “begin” with “Mangrove” in the late ’60s comes to a head. An infamous house party fire — remember, we dove into community house parties with “Lovers Rock” — is on everybody’s lips — “New Cross Massacre” they call it.
That leads to protests, a street march becomes “a riot” and that’s how Alex ends up in prison, taking stock of his life and not even 20 years old.
McQueen makes the viewer work towards understanding the themes and subtexts of these films. He gloriously recreates the jaw-dropping delight the bullied, racially-taunted kid experiences the first time he sees the shops and colorfully-attired street life of “his” people on moving day.
But the state-provided ride there has a wonderful clue about Alfonso’s transition to Alex. The kid hears the long-running BBC radio series “Desert Island Discs” and he catches one of its decades of guests, a writer, talking about hearing music so obviously the product of greatness that he listens to it “just hoping some of that would rub off.”
That first visit to a record store furthers Alex’s transformation. It’s 1980 and he’s just been introduced to yet another whole new world, the one the viewer’s already been shown in “Lovers Rock.”
Departing from the formula or your typical streaming series, McQueen has created five stand-alone movies that intersect, and as they do further illuminate aspects of the culture, characters who shaped it and people like Alex Wheatle and yes, Steve McQueen who emerged from it.
Born in West London in 1969 to parents from Trinidad and Grenada, today a Turner Prize-winning artist, Oscar-winning filmmaker and Commander of the British Empire, no character in McQueen’s “Small Axe” could possibly have seen the day his success would be possible. But they could dream.
MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug use, profanity
Cast: Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Jonathan Jules
Credits: Directed by Steve McQueen, script by Steve McQueen, Alastair Siddons. A BBC Films/Amazon release.
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