A winded, wan and somewhat already-played-out comedy about taking your shot in show business, “Hollyweird” has two things halfway going for it.
It has a point of view, and there’s a neat third act twist. If directing/co-writing husband and wife Edwin and Jaime Marie Porres had known what to run with, they might have made something out of it.
Stevie (Douglas Spain) is a broke LA waiter/actor desperate for his big break. He thinks it could be playing the heavy in this new cop thriller, “Hollyweird.”
But his African American agent Alice (Numa Perrier,writer, director and star of “Jezebel”) thinks he’s “not Latino enough.” He doesn’t seem tough enough to play a gangster, despite doing his stocking-capped, slouching/whispered “Yo, ese” act on her and everybody he waits on at the restaurant.
He has to go behind Alice’s back to even sneak an audition.
Alejandro (Michael J. Knowles) has hitchhiked his way into LA, and is literally just standing on the street when a producer “discovers” him and we discover how much the guy sounds like Pacino doing Tony Montana in “Scarface.” Cuban stranger with no acting credits, the job is YOURS!
“Joo chitting me?”
He’s “Cuban, REAL raw” the producer (Bill Posey) crows to the money guy. “It’s like he just SWAM over here!”
He’s the white and black film producers’ idea of “Latino” enough, a point this comedy should have pounded like a pneumatic hammer.
Hitting on a publicist (Deborah Dir) at “an industry party” that the producer of the film is throwing, Alejandro finds himself getting a makeover and a little staged paparazzi moment, paired up with a willing and notorious starlet. He’s a star before he’s ever done a thing…other than imitate Al Pacino.
Everything Stevie craves Alejandro has fall into his lap. Fancy clothes, a Dodge Challenger, Internet notoriety and a “breakout” role are his for the taking.
Stevie? He’s fending off the be-my-friend overtures of his Hollywood intern neighbor, Tabby (Madison Dewberry) and struggling in acting class.
“How are you feeling?” the teacher wants to know.
“I’m OK.“
“Was BRANDO ‘Ok?’ Was STREI-sand? I don’t SEE you!”
That’s acting class speak for “you’re not registering,” moving the needle, getting anybody’s attention. And that line doesn’t just fit the character, it’s a mark against the movie, too.
There’s great comic possibility in this set-up, and Knowles, deep into the whole “Say ‘allo to my lil’FRIEND” Pacino riff, tries to take us there. But virtually no scenes and no other characters have the same comic energy to them. And remember, Knowles is just doing a broad impersonation of another actor’s iconic role.
Drab “auditions,” dull “fights” on the set, tired situations — car trouble, losing jobs, losing agents, getting evicted — the whole movie is built on exhausted “making it in showbiz” tropes.
The mostly-bit players (save the screen veteran Perrier, and she has only a single scene) aren’t experienced or charismatic enough to make something out of a nothing-that-funny script. Whole rooms full of people auditioning actors, a whole set of filmmaking character “types,” not one of them registers or is given a single funny thing to say or play.
But James Tang, playing a landlord so impatient he interrupts/finishes every one of Steve’s litany of excuses for why the rent is late and when he’ll be able to pay for him, gives “Hollyweird” the rapid pace and testy edge it needed to get by.
And he, too, has only a single scene.
MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, adult situations
Cast: Douglas Spain, Deborah Dir, Michael J. Knowles and Madison Dewberry
Credits: Directed by Edwin Porres, script by Edwin Porres, Jaime Marie Porres. An Artists Rights release.
“Girl With No Mouth” is a savagely violent, downbeat Turkish dystopia, a picaresque “Peter Pan” (or “Wendy”) meets “How I Live Now.”
Can Evrenol’s thriller is heavy on parable, semi-nonsensical in plot, but benefits from good acting and a grimly-realized children’s odyssey undertaken in post-Apocalyptic future.
Years have passed since “The Great Explosion,” somehow triggered by “The Corporation,” broke down civilization and rendered a generation of children “defective.” They’ve supposedly all died out, or been killed. And with The Corporation now talking of peace and rebuilding, the ones still out there are somehow inconvenient.
That’s the good news/bad news that Kemal (Mehmet Yilmaz Ak) brings his brother (Sermet Yesil). The girl he raised into her tweens, teaching her how to hydrate and feed herself without a mouth? Peri (Elif Sevinç) has to be turned over.
Kemal works for The Corporation. Peri’s dad is all threats (in Turkish with English subtitles) about what he promised to do if this murderous “company man” ever showed up at his door. But they’re mostly empty. In a flash, Dad is dead and Peri is on the run — escaping by turning a door into a raft to float down the river and into the forest.
Not being able to speak, Peri loses herself in opera recordings on her Walkman. That’s how she steps into a snare, only to be rescued by The Captain (Denizhan Akbaba). His dark goggles give away his defect. He’s blind. But not to worry, he and his “band of pirates” compensate for each other’s “deficiencies.”
Bulky Yusek (Özgür Civelek) has no nose. Badger (Kaan Alpdayi) is deaf. None of them can read. Whatever communication barriers there are, Peri — who can read and has been home-schooled — is destined to come in very handy with these Lost Boys.
But Kemal and his murderous minions are on their trail, ready to burn down the forest to ferret them out. That sends the kids on a trek through the woods, to the abandoned village they call “The Lost City,” getting caught in firefights, stumbling across livestock and adults who could help or hurt them.
As with many movies set in this sort of dystopia, there’s a bit more showing us the world that was lost and the kids’ confusion about it than we need. A third act character whom I’ll call Auntie Exposition shows up to explain more than we need to know.
But it’s interesting watching Peri’s regimen for drinking (a feeding tube through the nose) and eating (a string-pull food-processor, diced comestibles fed through another tube to her stomach. Her enterprise saves the “pirates” from The Corporation, time and again.
Yes, it’s one of those thrillers where everybody lets the villain — who has made his villainy obvious — get away to try and kill them again and again.
And no, there’s nothing particularly allegorical about Evrenol and co-writer Kuya Ucun’s version of the future, where every child is flawed and only a gang of them can form up to create a “whole.”
The kids may be archetypes, but typically, there’s a more obvious parable packed into a feral childhood tale like this.
Lacking that as a driving force to the narrative, “Girl With No Mouth” and her crew just wanders about, into and out of bloody trouble, living through a pointless parable and survivalist tale with no real goal or destination.
MPA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Elif Sevinç, Özgür Civelek, Denizhan Akbaba, and Mehmet Yilmaz Ak, Sermet Yesil
Credits: Directed by Can Evrenol, script by Kuya Ucun and Can Evrenol. An Indiecan release.
Are great movies released at the end of January? No. But fun ones sometimes are. Jan. 21. https://youtu.be/8CO3jynIGGk
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You can be a fan of Minot, North Dakota’s own Josh Duhamel, and want to see his directing debut.
Fond memories of guy’s guy/car-guy funnyman of Dax Shepard? Yup.
And Olivia Munn as the gorgeous tough broad in a sea of testosterone? That always pays dividends.
But it’s the presence of Nick Swardson that’s the most important casting choice and the dead give-away for “Buddy Games,” a bro comedy about pals who bond over their annual contest of strength, skill, guts and stomach capacity. Nothing says “low, lower lowest brow” like Swardson. The star of “Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star” and “He’ll do anything for a laugh” mascot of Adam Sandler’s posse is a veritable brand name for juvenile gross-out. To me, his name in the credits is a guaranteed “pass,” especially since Sandler moved his aged act to Netflix.
“Buddy Games” is practically built around Swardson, leaning on him for the stomach-churning “comedy,” to sell assorted bodily-function/bodily fluids gags that others in the cast — Kevin Dillon included — would blanche from trying.
The script is slapdash and daft, and not in a good way. And you almost feel sorry for Swardson being forced to carry it and set the “teabagging” tone. But the viewer is the victim here.
Duhamel, Dillon, Shepard, Swardson, James Roday Rodriguez (“Psyche”) and Dan Bakkedahl (“Veep,” “The Goldbergs”) are friends who’ve been competing in this elaborate multi-discipline “Buddy Games” thing in the forests around a family cabin Bob’s family owns in the hills.
Whatever else has been going on in their lives — marriages, business ventures, dreams — they revert to their place in the pack whenever the “Games” roll around. Bob (Duhamel) becomes “The Bobfather,” planner of their various “tests.”
We meet them at the “last” Buddy Games. That’s where dominating jerk Shelly (Bakedahl) got carried away with the bullying, and got injured. Five years later, Shelly’s in assisted living, shattered and in need of a boost.
Doc ( Dillon) may be a successful chiropractor, Bob a man of means who lives with the temptress Tiffany (Munn) and gymrat Zane (Rodriguez) a tanning salon (mini) tycoon. But Durfy (Shepard), who gave up running a backhoe to pursue a Hollywood career, has only worked his way up to Neal McDonough’s stand-in. Perpetual loser Bender (Swardson) has run through his inheritance.
Shelly has lost the will to live. And he blames Bender for it.
Let’s get the gang back together, play a high-stakes version of those Buddy Games, and bond anew, mending old rifts, acting like 40something juvenile delinquents for one more weekend.
The events of this decathlon for douches include kayak races and dirt bike/ATV sprints, busting a watermelon with only your bare hands or head, a corn dog eating contest, chugging duels and strapping steaks to themselves to see which of them will let a wild animal eat it off his forehead. There’s also a bar pick-up competition, obstacle courses and a bow hunt pursuing “the most dangerous game.”
The winner gets a big cash prize, and most of them could really use that right about now.
I laughed twice, and one of those two moments came in the finale. No, the outtakes over the end credits don’t have so much as a grin in them.
The other laugh came from Swardson’s Bender, desperate to raise cash, selling vodka shots in competition with the neighborhood eight-year-olds, who’re running a lemonade stand. For once, Swardson’s go-to vulgarity amounts to mirth.
“You’re gonna be STRIPPERS when you grow up! Really BAD ones that NO one pays to see!”
Sex jokes, semen zingers, flatulence, gay gags and the aforementioned “teabagging” are the rule here. It’s like every idea and not-funny-enough profanity edited out of a Judd Apatow movie was cut and pasted into a script designed to mimic “Tag,” after a fashion.
It’s just terrible. With Nick Swardson in it, we should have known.
MPA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nudity, drug use and brief violence
Cast: Josh Duhamel, Olivia Munn, Dax Shepard, Nick Swardson, Kevin Dillon, James Roday Rodriguez and Dan Bakkedahl
Credits: Directed by Josh Duhamel, script by Jude Weng, Bob Schwartz and Josh Duhamel. A Saban Films release.
Meeting “the family” for the holidays can be messy.
Even without a pandemic and the possibility that you’ll end up hosting a “super spreader” event. Even if, say, you’re in a long-term single-sex relationship, you’ve never “come out” to your parents, Dad’s running for mayor and you make your girlfriend hide who she is “just for five days.”
Say the trite “joke” you just know someone will trot out with me — “How long can it be?”
That’s the premise of “Happiest Season,” a Kristen Stewart/Mackenzie Davis gay holiday romance making its debut on Hulu. And “messy” is its one-word review.
The leads make a cute couple, Dan Levy is here because even a same sex rom-com needs a snarky “gay best friend.” And little flashes of warmth and wit intrude on this sentimental, uneven, somewhat brittle holiday “message” with a movie sloppily wrapped around it.
It’s got Levy (“Schitt’s Creek”) cracking gay and Stewart taking a pratfall. Aubrey Plaza shows up as SOMEbody’s “ex,” and Mary Steenbergen amuses with even the lamest lines as the wound-tight mother who doesn’t know her daughter Harper (Davis) is gay, or that Abby (Stewart), the “roommate” she’s brought home for the holidays, is her loving life partner.
“Abby! What are you doing in the closet?”
Actress turned writer-director Clea Duvall (“The Intervention”) and comic actress turned first-time co-writer Mary Holland made something of a holiday hash of it, a movie with good moments buried under clumsy ones, with plenty of pandering layered on top of sentiment.
Abby is a Phd candidate and Pittsburgh dog-walker who loves local journalist Harper. But Abby, whose parents died some years before, isn’t into Christmas. Harper impulsively invites her home to meet the family. And we get the idea she regrets that pretty much the same moment she does.
Harper never told her parents. Dad (Victor Garber) has political ambitions, Mom (Steenbergen) is the queen of Keeping Up Appearances. Now “wouldn’t be a good time.”
So much for that ring Abby picked out, over the objections of Very Gay John (Levy). Abby is “trapping (Harper) in a box of heteronormality” with this Big Gesture.
Abby doesn’t find out about Harper’s secret until they’re almost “home,” so she’s trapped herself — the “roommate,” odd woman out in the “perfect” family’s very political over-scheduled holiday traditions and parties.
The running gag of Abby being “a poor orphan with no place else to go” gets old, to her and us. There’s also Mom’s shameless effort to throw Harper into the arms of her high school beau (Jake McDorman) and Harper’s endless efforts to please her parents, tolerate her daffy younger sister (co-writer Holland) and win the endless competition that characterizes her relationship with married-with-two-kids sister Sloane (Alison Brie).
It doesn’t matter that Sloane and her husband quit their law firm to “raise the kids” and that they’re “selling gift baskets” as a fallback career.
“We create curated gift experiences inside of handmade reclaimed wood vessels!”
The only people Abby has to talk to are John, who keeps calling her to shame her “back out of that closet,” and Riley, Harper’s “real” high school ex. She’s underplayed by Plaza as a dry, above-it-all sounding board with nothing funny to say or do.
That makes “Happiest Season” a holiday rom-com with two “firsts,” a K-Stew pratfall (Comedy isn’t her forte.) and Aubrey Plaza playing the comic “straight man.”
Duvall can’t make Abby and Harper “sneaking around” to be together in a house where they’ve been separated funny, can’t find a rhythm that allows the story to flow from laughs to romance to sentiment and heartache.
It staggers toward an ending that you just KNOW they won’t have the guts to get right.
The comic highlights are Levy’s over-the-top turn as John, Brie’s biting sibling rival sister and a WAY over the top shoplifting “interrogation” by mall cops.
The emphasis is thrown at the melodrama in the weary “late coming out” story, and that’s handled so gracelessly that Davis, equally at home in comedy and drama, is hung out to dry.
Stewart? A holiday movie isn’t the place to learn that pretending you’re in love with a teen vampire is easy, comedy is hard.
MPA Rating: PG-13 for some language
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Dan Levy, Mary Steenbergen, Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Mary Holland, Victor Garber, Jake McDorman, Clea Duvall and Mary Holland.
Credits: Directed by Clea Duvall, script by Clea Duvall and Mary Holland. A Sony/eOne film on Hulu.
There is nothing, simply nothing, to make you feel that you’ve led a sexually-sheltered life, that your understanding of the modern fluid, on-the-spectrum nature of sexuality is superficial at best, than “Queer Japan.”
One might have guessed that the culture that pretty much invented pornography, that perfected fetishes from schoolgirl uniforms to tentacles, where pornographic comic books have achieved the level of high art, would snap your head back and make your mouth drop when catching a glimpse of the gay life in the Land of the Rising Sun.
But damn.
Manga and drag fashion shows where the rubber literally meets the road, (“It’s my second skin,” one aficionado explains.), a popular lesbian “Gold Finger” party (wait for it), debates by the lesbian club owner who runs such parties about allowing “men who used to be women” admission, elaborate stage shows where an inflatable pig gives “birth” to rubber-clad “piglets,” kinky cosplayers creating sexy “pet” costumes — topped with a dog or cat head “mask” because they want to be “coddled,” fondled and adored like pets, Japan has it all. Or has at least tried it out.
Queer cinema auteur Graham Kolbeins (“Th House of Gay Art,” “Rad Queers”) takes a tour of “Queer Japan” and delivers a lurid, over-saturated blast of neon-colored eye candy, a film shot like a fashion video, capturing this oppressed but out-there minority in a country where “conformity” has always counted, even if they’ve always acknowledged their cultural kinkiness.
Kolbeins, grabbing more than 100 interviews for the film, samples a wide cross-section of Japanese LGBT culture, a wide span of ages, sexual preferences and sexualities, with manga artists, transgender activists, sex workers and people old enough to connect this to open-minded cultural traditions of The Edo Dynasty, which ended when America “opened” Japan in 1853 and the country became at least somewhat “Christianized.”
The film teaches us Japanese words — slurs and otherwise — for “gay.” “Hen” means “strange, queer,” “hentai” means “abnormal sexuality.” So when a big annual party, show and gala is thrown as “Dept. H.,” you know what you’re signing up for.
“We enjoy ambiguity,” one interviewee declares. Even if “we’re behind the times, compared to the rest of the world,” another offers.
Disparagement and discrimination lingers, even though Shinto and Buddhism, dominant religions, have “no problem” with “alternative” sexualities.
We see a Japanese version of Anita Bryant, testy about adding gay awareness to school curricula, jokingly dismissive of this “unproductive” (in a propagate the species sense) but increasingly visible minority.
People like her fret over the collapse of the national birth rate (Japan is aging and dying out, thanks to generations not having babies.), but literally laugh on TV at the news that gay teens commit suicide at six times the national average for that age group.
It’s little wonder that as in other countries, queer Japan has made allies with other discriminated-against “outsiders,” marching with the Zainichi (Korean immigrants and their descendants) in protest of right wing harassment.
Red light districts to clubs, runway shows to Youtube channels, an aesthetically daring “reversible identity” apartment complex, “pride” marches or stepping out into politics, “Queer Japan” as portrayed here comes off as a not-quite-hidden culture in a rush to make up for lost time, like Spain after Franco or New York after Stonewall.
It’s hard to keep track who everyone is and how they fit into all this, a bit overwhelming, as if Kolbeins and co-writer Anne Ishii edited down a TV or online series of shows into a single film (Did they?). But if you’re up for a little Total Immersion in another culture’s non-conformists, it’d be hard to top “Queer Japan.”
MPA Rating: Unrated, and “out there” in a sexual sense.
Cast: Nogi Sumiko, Saeborg, Gengoroh Tagame, Vivienne Sato, Akira the Hustler, Leslie Kee, Atsushi Matsuda, many other
Credits: Directed by Graham Kolbeins, script by Anne Ishii, Graham Kolbeins. An Altered Innocence release on Apple TV, Prime Video, etc. on Dec. 11.
One bit of bookkeeping seems to have evaded the Hollywood devouring Mouse when it swallowed 20th Century Fox.
There were these Fox franchises Disney took over the rights to. Those franchises, two of them any way, had led to books — novelizations of “Star Wars” and “Alien” installments. Those books still sell. And Disney has refused to pay royalties to sci fi writer Alan Dean Foster, who wrote many of those novels.
Writers in this genre guard their rights, authorship credits and royalties with the ferocity of the late Harlan Ellison. Foster and the sci fi writers guild are outing the Mouse for ripping him off. Lawyers are involved.
This has been Disney”s brand for decades. The biggest studio, one of the world’s largest and most viable corporations, and they always cheap out on talent. Always.
They’ve gotten Congress to give them exceptions to copyright laws so that they can “protect” Mickey and other “properties” “to infinity and beyond.” But others are denied those protections whenever the Mouse deems it to be in their best interest.
Being big, they’re a lawsuit magnet. You think they’d know better than this. The optics are awful. But every now and then they go as far as flat out ripping somebody off and we read about it when lawyers get involved.
Filmmaker Eric Power turns the digital version of that cut-out construction paper style of animation that “South Park” made famous loose on a town-attacked-by-demons thriller, “Attack of the Demons.”
It’s more interesting as DIY animation than as a movie, with inexpressive faces and flat-voiced actors and not nearly enough scripted wit to carry it. Sure, a cute melting skin/peeling-the-skin-off effect and the odd demon beheading can be amusing. But “Demons” is like a blandly-written and drawn horror comic, as lifeless as construction paper.
Barrington is home to a popular Halloween Festival, complete with horror movies at The Tower (theater) and battles of the “horror punk” bands at assorted venues.
Kevin, voiced by Thomas Peterson, is into film and living with his grandmother. Jeff (Andreas Peterson, who also wrote the script) is into “Rodent Rumble” and assorted other video games.
And Natalie (Katie Maguire) is returning to her hometown with her jerky music critic boyfriend Chet and his snide pal Brandon to review a show. They review the small city as well.
“I feel like these waffles are giving me cholera!”
Natalie runs into Kevin and Jeff, people who graduated together but don’t really know each other. Then she heads off to see her favorite band, Teak (“This one’s called ‘Sleeping Trees,’ off our new EP.”). Jeff goes back into the arcade. Kevin?
“Music isn’t your thing? What’s that even MEAN?”
They’re each off on their own when a demon takes to the main music stage, kills and creates recruits (like zombies) and takes over the town. There’s nothing for it but to flee to the mountain, and the old haunted mine, fighting/ducking demons every step of the way.
The immobile nature of the faces takes us back to the early “South Park,” before digitization allowed more malleable mouth-eye-nose reactions. Here, the dull amateurish line readings don’t help.
The friends-making-a-movie vibe that permeates this — Power did the animation himself, guessing the Petersons are siblings — is the most charming thing about “Attack of the Demons.” A wittier script might have allowed that friends DIYing a horror cartoon vibe to translate into something more fun on the screen.
Cast: The voices of Katie Maguire, Andreas Peterson, Thomas Peterson and Eric Power.
Credits: Directed by Eric Power, script by Andreas Peterson. A self-distributed release on Youtube, Vudu and Amazon Prime.
No, it’s NOT based on the anime series from about a decade ago.
Dec. 18, IFC Midnight unleashes the hounds. Or wolf.
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