That little dickens Anna Kendrick already did a Christmas movie. But “Happy Christmas” was a bit more naughty than…you know.
So here she is in a genuine Disney Christmas movie for kids, back on Disney+ for the holidays. Did you catch it last year? Do the kids want to see it again?
“Noelle” is sentimental farce that puts Miss “Pitch Perfect” in holiday tights and Christmas sweaters as Santa’s daughter, second banana to older brother Nick (Bill Hader), a woman who has never left the North Pole and who “majored in calligraphy and minored in popcorn stringing.”
But she’s sensitive, always looking out for others. And she “twinkles.” Nick is stressing about taking on the new job, so she suggests he “take a weekend off” have a little get away. Nick doesn’t come back. Even the North Pole puffins are peeved.
Noelle has to “borrow” the sleigh, with trusty nanny elf Polly (Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine) and track Nick down to whatever destination in the travel mag she gave him he might have ventured.
It’s Phoenix, and no, she doesn’t have to circle the globe hunting for him to other cities. That’s the first missed opportunity in a limp comedy that Kendrick has to carry all by herself.
They don’t have her sing, just a little “Tra la la” this and “fa la” that, summoning her animal buddy Snowcone, the (digital) white reindeer calf.
They do let her show off her language skills, which hints at a better comedy that might have been. She’s just as funny in French.
Track down Nick, or tech nerd cousin Gabe (a sadly subdued Billy Eichner) will take over, digitally crack down on the “Naughty or Nice” list and let Amazon Prime replace the sleigh, reindeer, etc.
Nerd.
This childish confection was cooked up by Marc Lawrence, who was once Sandra Bullock’s go-to guy (“Miss Congeniality” scripts, “Two Weeks Notice”), and it’s got a quest and a would-be love interest, the private eye (Kingsley Ben-Adir) Noelle hires to help her locate Nick. Can she afford him? Will he take North Pole gold (covered chocolate) coins?
“Bring non-edible money.”
It has Hader with very little that’s funny to play.
But there’s an elvish quintet who sing little commentaries on the proceedings like a Greek chorus.
“Joy to the world, except for YOU.”
That’s a gimmick worth running with. As with too many other mildly-promising tidbits, Lawrence doesn’t.
But the ladies sell this, with old pros MacLaine and Julie Haggerty (as Mrs. Claus, Noelle’s worrywart Mom) giving it their all.
And Kendrick? After 45 minutes or so of thin entertainment, Anna gets her groove back. Bubbly Noelle has no time for pessimism.
“That’s pretty stocking half-empty.”
She’s got to keep her true identity from the simple happy natives of Phoenix. Where’s she from?
“A little town…up north.”
“Canada?”
“Canada WISHES.”
And arguing with a sibling who’s found “yoga” is apt to bring tears.
“Oh! You! Better not pout, you BETTER not cry!”
In sum, Kendrick’s twinkles. “Noelle” doesn’t. Let her sing and get her a dozen more jokes and this one could have been a holiday keeper.
MPA Rating: G.
Cast: Anna Kendrick, Bill Hader, Shirley MacLaine, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Michael Gross.
Credits: Written and directed by Marc Lawrence. A Disney release on Disney+.
“Playhouse” is a stylish British ghost story with a great, gloomy Scottish setting, and little else to recommend it.
It’s not frightening, rarely suspenseful and never comes close to the harrowing experience audiences have come to expect from horror movies these days. It’s all squandered opportunities and dull substitutions for our best guesses as to where it will go next.
But the set up is solid gold. A grumpy teen (Grace Courtney) and her Dad (William Holstead) have relocated from London to this seaside Scottish “castle.” It’s one of those homely manor houses that used to be a castle, victim of a drab Dickensian makeover or two over the decades.
But Dad, Jack Travis, has big plans for it. He’s the “horropreneur” of The West End, a successful playwright who has a mind to turn this place into an immersive theatrical experience, “the living play,” he calls it. He’s so deep into the idea that he’s talking to the dead son of the late laird of the manor.
“We’ll show them, won’t we, Alastair?”
Daughter Bee sees all the news-clippings on Dad’s bulletin board, even if she doesn’t overhear him improvising dialogue around the place’s unfortunate history. People have died, an aristocratic family left secrets and perhaps unfortunate members buried in the wall.
Bee, just finishing school, invites classmates over for a spooky evening of drinks, candles and wild tales of the place. They egg each other on until they’ve laid hands upon “the wall,” an exposed part of the older incarnation of the “castle,” where you can still “hear Alastair…the laird’s son” screaming if you touch it.
The girls might not have played this “game” had they known “Bee” is short for “Beleth,” one of the “Kings” (or queens) of Hell.
Can I mention what an utter bust this scene is, dramatically?
Jenny (Helen Mackay) is a curious neighbor who grew up down the lane. She and husband Callum (James Rottger) may be here to tidy up granny’s old place to sell it. But the history of “the castle” tugs at her, and pretty soon they’re having a tetchy dinner with the Travis’s.
What are the secrets this spooky place will draw out of our principals? And what secrets does the castle have for those who dare to dwell there as they hunt for actors and financing for a theatrical theme-park style spooktactular?
Holstead, of “The Burying Party,” has precious little to play here. Jack has to be off his rocker to think he’ll lure people to the middle of nowhere to experience his “living play.” He hints that he expects folks to want to move there just to be a part of this thing. Holstead doesn’t give us much that says “madness.”
Courtney’s “Bee” is all sullen and bangs, and the movie loses track of her for most of the second half. So no help there.
And Mackay and Rottger, playing a couple who aren’t on the same page, with ties to the spooky house that aren’t mysterious or shocking, don’t add much to the proceedings. Something draws Callum to Jack, but there’s no hint of the house putting him under its spell, just as there’s too little of that where Jack is concerned as well.
So what we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.
Except that it being Scotland, there’re no bleeding trees.
MPA Rating: unrated, horror imagery, profanity
Cast: William Holstead, Grace Courtney, Helen Mackay, James Rottger
Credits: Written and directed by Fionn Watts and Toby Watts. A Devilworks release.
There’s a moment, after we’ve seen an hour of the stoic Swedish teen Greta Thunberg start a global climate movement, meet with world leaders and agree to every “selfie” asked of her by fans along the way, when we get a taste of just what this activism has cost her.
It’s not in the scary “security” briefing and first aid refresher course her dad, Svante, gets after the death threats start. And it doesn’t come the first time she expresses dismay and even outrage at the “fake” political leaders and all the lip service paid her cause when the cameras are rolling and Celebrity Greta is present.
She’s on board the racing sloop “Malizia II,” bombing across the Atlantic on a carbon-fibre/carbon-neutral sailboat trip to New York. The seas are heaving, but she’s as poker-faced as a Vegas high roller. It’s the tearful aftermath of a call home that reminds us that she’s just 16 when this footage was shot. She’s a teenager with Asperger’s forced to cope with being mobbed, meeting tens of thousands of strangers when what she craves are solitude, “routine,” and the family and the animals she always found easier to relate to.
“I Am Greta” isn’t just about a global phenomenon that’s grown out of one child’s protest. It’s about what a little girl, derided by climate change deniers and right wing pundits as “mentally ill” and “depressed” and “attention-starved,” having the do a staggering laundry list of things she fears the most in life because of one thing she fears worse than any other — mass extinction and an unending climate crisis that leads to it.
Nathan Grossman’s marvelous “fly on the wall” documentary follows Thunberg from that first day, as she took her hand-drawn placard and sat down in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.
“SKOLSTREJK for KLIMATET,” it read. “School Strike for Climate.”
Adults shake their heads as they pass. One older woman stops to gently lecture her that yes, there’s a crisis, but you’d get more accomplished staying in school.
“No one gives a damn,” Greta mutters, in Swedish, with English subtitles.
And then other kids join her. A tiny bit of online video attention follows, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with millions of followers on Twitter, endorses her protest. Just like that, a Swedish protest becomes a European, and then global phenomenon and movement.
What humanizes her is how she soldiers through all this activity that she has an aversion to, accompanied by her skeptical father, polishing her message and sharpening her criticism, which she gets the chance to deliver in the world’s most public places — at conferences, in British parliament (“Is my microphone on?” she wants to know, in English. “Because you don’t seem to be hearing me.”) and at the U.N.
“I want you to panic. I want you to act like the house is on fire.”
Because, frankly, it is.
Grossman’s film makes us appreciate what a smart kid she is and how she somehow shrugs off her symptoms and the way she triggers the climate-denial right. Her Dad should have bought a plane ticket to Australia and punched the wingnut who called his daughter “a virtue signaling little turd” on Murdoch-friendly TV. But you know, flying is off limits in this family. That’s why she traveled to the UN via sailboat, after all.
Being on the autism spectrum may explain her laser-intense focus on this issue, on “drowning polar bears, deforestation and ocean acidification.” She freely admits it lets her “see through the static.”
Her Dad may be proud of her ability to turn herself into an expert on this subject and a global icon through her “almost photographic memory” (a politician fervently shoves a big climate report into her hands as she’s heading into one speech) and well-intentioned obsession. What moves her mother Elena to tears is just the knowledge that Greta is now able to “eat in front of other people,” another phobia related to her condition that she won’t let stop her.
Who knows if she’ll remain this focused on this issue forever? And will she remain an icon when she’s no longer a pony-tailed teen?
But when she promises “We will be a pain in the ass” of officialdom, and “We will not stop,” I wouldn’t bet against her. She’s already one tough, laser-focused broad.
MPA Rating: unrated, a little profanity
Cast: Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emanuel Macron, Pope Francis
Credits: Directed by Nathan Grossman. A Hulu release.
For everybody who found the polish, sophistication and gentility of “The Devil’s Rejects” a turn-off, we present “Derelicts,” a little slice of holiday slaughter from the people who brought you…
Hell, I’ve never heard of any of them, and neither have you.
It’s a slasher/splatter pic about murderous drifters who dismember, shoot, skull-crush and sexually assault a seriously dysfunctional family gathering for an uneasy Thanksgiving dinner.
Constance (Kelly Dealyn) wakes up with a dream droplet of blood on her cheek. Testy husband Gregg (David Lee Hess) has no time for that. He’s prepping the meal for HER family. And her ob-gyn Dad (Steve Uzzell) and his new girlfriend (Lana Dieterich) woke everybody up early with their noisy love-making.
Gregg’s an out-of-work theater company director, their near-adult son Leslie (Dalton Allen) is a sex-obsessed cretin and daughter Barbara (Emily Ammon) is going through a mental health crisis that manifests itself with blackouts on the (running) track and nosebleeds.
Then this slaughterhouse gang of five led by “Cap” (Les Best) wipes out Constance’s brother and nephew, hijacks their truck and apparently follows the onboard GPS (only way to explain it) to their house.
Let the torture, murders and dress-for-dinner games begin.
“This is MY house!” the Cap lets one and all know. “I carved it outta the bones of 40 dead Chinamen in Cambodia, and I’m about to PAINT it in your blood!”
He’s got an “x” tattooed between his eyebrows, so any resemblance to Charles Manson is intentional.
The gang includes “Black Forrest” (Sam Pleasant), killer shrew Bo (Kara Mellyn) and most horrifically, “Turk” (Andre Evrenos) who never speaks. He only screams. Oh, and he’s fashioned a pink teddy bear into a mask.
The mayhem starts with another murder getting in the front door, then sexual assaults and escalates from there.
“FINGER food?”
Anyway, you get the idea. There’s nothing remotely witty about this, no real room for pathos or outrage either.
But as outraged Gregg is moved to ask, perhaps speaking to the potential audience of such movies — “Is that how you people get off?”
Don’t answer that.
MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual assault, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Les Best, Kelly Dealyn, Sam Pleasant, David Lee Hess, Steve Uzzell, Dalton Allen, Emily Ammon, Marcela Pineda and Andre Evrenos
Credits: Directed by Brett Glassberg, script by Andre Evrenos, Brett Glassberg and Clay Shirley. A Terror Films release.
There’s no footage of Hurricane Maria’ pounding Puerto Rico back in 2017, back when the storm made landfall and wrecked the island.
We don’t see the gas lines, people lining up for water, the months of governmental indifference in San Juan and Washington.
No, there’ll be no paper-towel tossing here.
Cecilia Aldarondo’s “Landfall” is an impressive, impressionistic and intimate overview of the unhappy “Island of Enchantment” as it stands today, years after Hurricane Maria hit.
She ends her film with scenes of the street protests that brought down the island’s corrupt government in 12 days back in 2019. But everything that comes before is people reminiscing about the “tragedy” of Maria and “the real disaster (that) happened afterwards.” New Orleans level devastation, all levels of government services lost, decades of mismanagement, postponed infrastructure and incompetence all came home to roost.
People on the farms of Orocovis, in the beachfront tourist cities, on Vieques Island were cut off. “We didn’t know when help from the U.S.” was coming.
Those warehouses full of cases of bottled water that was never distributed? They’re shown here, and the natives are still furious about that.
Aldarondo, director of “Memories of a Penitent Heart,” travels the length and breadth of Puerto Rico, Bartolo to Dorado, San Juan to Rincón, sketching in lives interrupted but getting back to dinner-party-normal, fishermen back to harvesting spiny lobster, farmers hitching up oxen to the plow again.
But beyond all that, there is youthful discontent and island-wide fury at “The Junta,” the Obama-appointed fiscal management board trying to get the island’s debt under control.
In mid-crisis, outsiders are still looking for ways to cut costs and services.
Luxury real estate developers are cashing in, luring blockchain/crypto-currency hipsters into buying mansions. That’s a hustle that amounts to an entire chapter of “Landfall,” with Brock Pierce and other tycoons of digital currency trying to sell the island on becoming a haven for their online business and a tax shelter for their class of entrepreneurs.
Aldarondo captures a heated meeting with locals, with Pierce losing his temper but holding his own, in Spanish and English, with skeptical Puerto Ricans, who see this blockchain pitch as another short-term “gain,” like the island’s brief flirtation with industrialization in the ’50s and 60s.
Using old newsreels and tourism promotional films, she paints a portrait of past promise, and promises broken. If the Bitcoin billionaires get their way, will Puerto Rico progress into some status other than “territory/colony?” Not if that means taxes.
That’s one of the take-aways from “Landfall,” which will be on PBS’s “POV” series next year, but can be streamed during its Oscar qualifying run via DOC/NYC this week. As Puerto Ricans march, take over abandoned schools to house themselves in co-ops run like communes, and fight off complaints about “socialism,” none of the mostly-unnamed interview subjects makes any noise about “statehood.”
One member of the New York Puerto Rican diaspora complains about the city not being “my country.” Do they want independence? Will there blockchain mogul money behind such a push?
“Landfall” doesn’t really ask such questions, or answer them. Aldarondo was going for something more impressionistic and kaleidoscopic. But the documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.
MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, smoking
Credits: Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo. An ITVS/POV release.
Young woman wants to make it as a stand-up comic, stalks her geezer heckler, “a comedy urban legend” until he agrees to coach her.
We all know where “All Joking Aside” is going, basically by the time the opening credits end. But those credits, underscored with a collage of comic bits, have a point that I’ll come back to — this joke.
“NOBODY wants to be a stand-up. We all wanted to be actors. But crunches are HARD!”
So watching and listening to 20something Canadian actress Raylene Harewood struggle and “get better,” as the stand-up film formula ordains, one can be forgiven for getting stuck on that opening credits zinger delivered by a comic whose face we don’t see.
She’s lovely. She’s done the crunches. She gets more comfortable on the stage, the script’s “material” improves, and she’s still not funny.
So why would she want to play a comic?
This Canadian production doesn’t differ from any other movie about the struggle to be a stand-up, from “Punch Line” on down the line. So let’s pass along the best of the sage profundities served up by the “washed-up” alcoholic comic, ably played by veteran character actor Brian Markinson, who had the good sense to never do a “set.”
“Look girl, there are two types of people in this world — funny people and happy people. You cannot be both. Do yourself a favor and go try to be happy.”
“A comic is judged every twelve seconds of his life.”
And “Bob,” the legendary comic who never got a sitcom, who supposedly managed 1000 sets, all different, in one epic year on the road, opens “All Joking Aside” with the best single-sentence review the picture could hope for.
“I’ve seen this movie a dozen times, sweetheart.”
Harewood’s a good actress, and gives a little weight to the “problems” Charlie, her character, deals with, that “personal s—” she’s supposed to “work out on the stage.”
But she’s not funny. Her delivery is all rounded locutions, prissy posh Kerry Washingtonish, not exaggerated enough to be Drew Barrymore funny.
Not that we’d see either of them as stand-ups. Because they’ve done the crunches.
“All Joking Aside” isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.
Jenny Slate’s “Obvious Child” comes to mind. She’s funny, a convincing stand-up, but that’s not what has to carry the movie.
Not saying that this movie needed an unwanted pregnancy story, with stand-up as its subtext. But all joking aside, that would’ve been funnier.
MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking.
Cast: Raylene Harewood, Brian Markinson, Dave “Squatch” Ward, Katrina Reynolds
Credits: Directed by Shannon Kohli, script by James Pickering. A Quiver release.
He was a modest, pious farm boy sent into the slaughterhouse of trench warfare in World War I.
When his moment came, he covered a withdrawal of Allied forces by single-handedly staying behind and mowing down the Germans with a succession of Lewis (machine) guns.
He didn’t sing his own praises, but as others recognized what he did and called attention to it, he became his country’s most famous infantryman of The Great War. They even named his hometown after him.
Seen through American eyes, Aníbal Milhais is Portugal’s Sergeant York, brave, a crack shot whose grit stood out among the faceless masses of the trenches, a symbol of sacrifice and a “Hero on the Front.”
Milhais earns a generic combat bio-pic from co-directors Gonçalo Galvão Teles and Jorge Paixão da Costa, nothing that will make anyone forget the superb action, suspense and artistic aims of “1917,” but technically and aesthetically serviceable and well-acted.
The script follows Milhais into the trenches as a young man (João Arrais) and back home, raising his daughter years later as an older father (Miguel Borges), someone not impressed enough by the ceremony where they rename his village for him to show up on time, distracted by farm problems, including the wolf that’s killing his sheep.
The illiterate young man copes with the deadly tedium in the trenches, the snipers that thin their ranks, the whistles that officers blow to send them “over the top”) and strain that sends comrades off their rocker.
A kind doctor convinces him to write to his (also illiterate) beloved (Filipa Louciero) back in Valongo.
Back home, older, wiser and decorated, he hasn’t let go of the cynicism that pervaded the ranks of Portugal’s 75,000 man expeditionary force.
“The soldier is an ornament for politicians to parade,” he tells his little girl (Carminho Coelho), in Portuguese with English subtitles.
As the combat service proceeds to Aníbal’s moment of truth, we follow the older father as his daughter trails him into the foothills and forest, in search of a sheep-killing wolf.
That’s a nice parallel in Mário Botequilha and Jorge Paixão da Costa’s script, a little heavy on the war/wolf allegory, but it works. And the striking settings of Aníbal’s north Portugal home can be both pretty and primal. This is where life and death has always been on the line.
The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.
That goes for “Hero on the Front (titled “Soldado Milhões” in Portugal) as well. Political unrest in Lisbon is the background for the expeditionary force’s departure and is unexplained. The strain on the soldiers didn’t have a name until World War I, and is thinly developed.
But it’s still an interesting story of a farm lad who did his duty, survived the slaughter and didn’t think much of the people who sent him there or their honors and decorations.
MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: João Arrais, Miguel Borges, Raimundo Cosme, Carminho Coelho and Ivo Canelas
Credits: Directed by Gonçalo Galvão Teles, Jorge Paixão da Costa, script by Mário Botequilha, Jorge Paixão da Costa. A Film Movement+ release.
The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.
For his latest, the filmmaker who gave us “My Best Fiend” (about working with madman/actor Klaus Kinski), “Grizzly Man” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” travels the world with a Cambridge planetary scientist in search of meteorites, their impact on life on Earth — perhaps even as the source of life on Earth — and on human history.
In “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds,” Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer visit meteor craters in Australia, India and the Yucatan, travel to Mecca (via pilgrims’ cell phone video of touching the pre-Islamic sacred meteorite, “The Black Rock”) to Antarctica with scientists look for fresh meteors and to Norway where a jazz musician and amateur meteor hunter finds micrometeorites. They visit the quirky French Alsatian town of Ensisheim, where a 1492 meteor strike became famous for altering European history and is commemorated to this day.
His co-filmmaker, scientist Clive Oppenheimer, questions the legions of astronomers, meteor specialists and Planetary Defense (“killer” meteorite hunters) and natives in the Outback.
Herzog captures faces, and the spectacle of Mecca and the skull makeup word by participants of a Day of the Dead festival in Merida, Mexico, the exultation of scientists finding a fresh meteorite on the snow of a high plateau near the South Pole.
And Herzog narrates, comments on scientists who might be able to go on and on on their subject, “never boringly,” breaking off a digression into an “impossible form of matter” (quasi crystals) found in meteors with “Yes, it gets so complicated now that we’re not going to torture you with details.”
Then, there’s Paul Steinhart, once dragged to Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in search of the early 20th century extraterrestrial explosion that leveled forests, even though his “outdoor experience did not extend beyond the lawns of Princeton.”
Herzog sets the travelogue scene in far away places like the shoreline of the Yucatan peninsula in the center of where the “dinosaur killer” asteroid struck eons ago.
“Chicxulub Puerto is a beach resort so godforsaken you want to cry…only leaden boredom weighs upon everything.”
That’s our Werner.
The narration tries a bit too hard this time out. It’s almost his sole presence in “Fireball,” so much so that you fret “He’s gotten too old to be making these journeys into the mystic himself” any more. But no. A single off-camera question lets us know he’s back on Antarctica, where he filmed “Encounters at the End of the World.”
But he’s still the most curious, empathetic and fascinating filmmaker the screen has produced. And if his curiosity is cave paintings from the Dawn of Man, the last days of the Grizzly Man, or our relationship to fireballs from the sky, we’re blessed to have him inviting us along as his traveling, investigating companion.
Cast: Narrated by Werner Herzog, with Clive Oppenheimer, Kelly Fast, Meenakshi Wadhwa, Jan Braly Kihle, Jon Larsen, Simon Schaffer and Paul Steinhart.
Credits: Directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, script by Werner Herzog. An Apple TV+ release.
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