A John Patrick Shanley script, with Jon Hamm as well. Faith and begorrah!
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Vince Vaughn runs like a teenage girl. News flash, right?
In the body switch horror comedy “Freaky,” he puts that rarely-seen talent (check out the touch football game in “Wedding Crashers”) to good use as a serial killer who switches bodies with a mousey high school girl.
When “The Blissfield Butcher” becomes meek high school mascot Millie (Kathryn Newton of “Blockers” and “Big Little Lies”), “she” becomes ravenously ruthless and murderous.
And he screams in fright, realizes “Standing and peeing is kinda rad” and scampers hither and yon with his-her hands in the air like a girl who who’s scared.
It’s “Freaky Friday” with a “Scream” twist. Throw a bunch of teen “types” in the path of a pathological killer, with each death meant to generate a laugh– whacked in a wine cellar, chopped in shop class, crushed by a commode.
Millie’s two BFFs, Nila (Celeste O’Connor) and Joshua (Misha Osherovich) get it.
“You’re Black, I’m gay. We are sooooooo dead!”
Millie, stuck in her Blissfield Valley Beavers’ mascot costume, waiting for her widowed wino mom (Katie Finnernan) to pick her up after the Homecoming game, sees the stadium lights go out and a hulking dude straight out of local urban legend marches toward her.
“Please don’t be The Butcher! Please don’t be The Butcher!”
It’s no use. But the murderer, who has slaughtered his way through a couple of Homecoming’s over the years, stole this collectible Mayan dagger. When he stabs her, their bodies switch.
She is he and he is she. If only they can remember that.
“PRONOUNS!” Joshua the gay kid is here to keep that “straight.”
Over the course of a long night, Millie needs to convince her friends she’s in “his” body, track down The Butcher, dodge her sister the cop and reverse the body-switch with the magic knife — that’s now police evidence in an attempted murder.
The bullied, sexless girl is transformed into an assertive bombshell, and the tall, middle-aged brute finds a sensitive side.
A couple of one-liners land in the first act, but the movie doesn’t start until Butcher/Vaughn starts running like a girl.
And truthfully, while he makes the whole “I’m really your meek, sweet friend Millie” thing funny, not much else plays that way.
A cruel shop teacher (Alan Ruck of “Ferris Bueller” cast against type), assorted jocks, bullies and a mean girl — who will face Millie’s revenge?
Director and co-writer Christopher Landon (the “Happy Death Day” films were his, and “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) doesn’t have enough jokes or amusingly murderous sight gags to make “Freaky” take flight.
Terror? Suspense? They don’t figure here, even with a “Butcher” on the loose.
What Landon and “Freaky” have is Vince Vaughn running and shrieking like a girl, and making eyes at the boy Millie crushes on. That’s not quite enough to make this movie’s “Freaky” flag fly.
MPA Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence, sexual content, and language throughout
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Celeste O’Connor, Misha Osherovich, and Alan Ruck
Credits: Directed by Christopher Landon, script by Michael Kennedy and Christopher Landon. A Blumhouse/Universal release.
A George Soros documentary biography from the guy who directed “How High” and “Kicking and Screaming?”
It could work. “Soros” streams beginning Nov. 18.
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Just defining who and what Frank Zappa was, just categorizing the music he performed, is daunting enough. Try summing up his life and career in a mere documentary.
Autodidact and polymath, iconoclast, satirist and gadfly, composer of comic ditties, fusion mashups and pieces for full if somewhat oddly-adorned orchestras in “rhythmic polymetric notation,” Zappa cut a huge swath through music, culture and the “culture wars” before he died of prostate cancer in 1993.
Alex Winter’s “Zappa” is perhaps the most thorough Zappa screen biography to come along, and that’s acknowledging how hopeless the job of making The Compleat Zappa bio-doc is. And even this two hours+ film is missing memories from Zappa’s famous (and apparently feuding) children. There’s no mention of his first band, and that famous appearance, as a kid, on a Steve Allen show “playing” a bicycle is left out.
Winter — best-known for being the first half of “Bill & Ted,” but director of terrific non-fiction films on crypto-currency and “The Panama Papers” — frames “Zappa” within Frank’s late life triumphs.
Zappa was so celebrated in Czechoslovakia that after “The Velvet Revolution,” he was brought in and feted, mobbed everywhere he went when he performed there in 1991. The reasons for that are surprising, and explained here.
And his late-life orchestral concerts in Frankfort, Germany with Ensemble Modern are sampled to close the film.
But one thing “Zappa” gets across most clearly is that his shows were never mere “concerts.” Modernist, jazzy and surreal “comedy rock,” they were multi-media events — often with choreography — “happenings” as they could be called in the ’60s, but spectacles to the very end.
An old interview shows Zappa taking a film crew through his vast personal archives, album and concert master recordings. He kept home tapes of jams with friends from Don Glen (Van) Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, Eric Clapton and others, his films and films he did soundtracks for such as stop-motion clay animations by filmmaker and fan Bruce Bickford — the works. Winter had access to mountains of material, hour after hour of Zappa interviews on TV and radio, a famous 1970s TV special that never aired.
“Go ahead and bleep it,” Zappa jokes to one New York chat show host who feigns shock at the unfiltered Frank’s 1970s provocations. Conservatives debating him over censoring and/or putting warning stickers on music in the ’80s were left no doubt what Frank thought they should “kiss.” On TV.
The filmmaker spoke with many a musician who worked with Zappa over the decades, from The Mothers of Invention to Steve Vai. Alice Cooper describes him as “our savior,” with Zappa signing Cooper & Band to a record deal that launched them.
Rare footage of John Lennon and Yoko Ono joining Frank and The Mothers onstage captures just how influential the guy was during his Laurel Canyon heydays, in the 1960s.
The Kronos Quartet gets together for a fresh rendition of a piece Zappa composed for them in the ’80s.
The portrait that emerges is complicated and messy, an arrogant, brilliant, condescending and standoffish artist who wanted every show to be it’s own “composition.”
“It won’t be perfect, it’ll be music,” he lectures his accompanists for one show, informing them that he will at times just “show you a chord” and expect them to invent and keep up.
A sexist and a womanizer, “politically incorrect” way ahead of his time, every record he made during his “rock” years was filled with provocations and slaughtered sacred cows.
Zappa kept even musicians he used again and again over the decades at arm’s-length. “You were just a tool” to him, Vai offers, and longtime collaborator Ruth Underwood and others agree.
But few musicians persevered through wide public indifference like Zappa, and few made grander use of every “moment” the culture afforded him. He was disdainful of the dumb drug jokes of his 1978 “Saturday Night Live” appearance. But the show, where he ridiculed disco with “Dancing Fool,” was something of a cultural watershed. Disco died that night.
“Valley Girl” became a touchstone, and remembering its sad origins (Moon Unit, his daughter, slipped a note “pitching” the basic idea under her neglectful Dad’s studio door) colors in his character further — playful music made by a serious, cynical workaholic.
But long before that “break,” all the “cool kids” knew “Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.” And after “Valley Girl,” America had its most outspoken champion of free speech. Zappa spent much of the ’80s doing interviews on TV and appearing before Congress.
For all the archival Zappa interviews, Winter’s anchor interview here is footage of Zappa’s widow Gail (who died in 2015), the one who “got” him, put up with him and kept the flame of his ouevre alive. Gail Zappa ties most of the disparate elements that comprised Frank together for “Zappa,” from his cultural commentary to his musical idealism.
He didn’t seek fame or riches from his music, Gail says. Frank’s measure of whether a piece was a success was “how close did you get to the realization of the idea as you had it.” Maybe he was never truly satisfied. But what he left behind influenced others, and endures in its own right. Because nobody else ever did it the way Zappa did.
MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, lots and lots of smoking
Cast: Frank Zappa, Ruth Underwood, Gail Zappa, Steve Vai, Alice Cooper, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, Mike Kenneally and Ray White
Credits: Directed by Alex Winter. A Magnolia release.
“The Giant” is a colossal waste of time, 100 minutes of underlit scenes filled with (mostly) high school characters whispering every single profundity that writer/director David Raboy can think of putting in their mouths in a story that never engages us or even tries to.
It’s a stunningly dull Deep South thriller about kids trying “make one last memory” after another with a serial killer taking out teen girls from the area, one at a time.
Raboy’s script isn’t so much cryptic as obtuse, with the kids whispering on and on, all nostalgic for the lives they just graduated from, heedlessly partying and hitting The Ole Swimmin’ Hole and attributing the deaths to some unseen, unknowable “giant in the woods.”
Heedless youth ignoring the COVID virus analogies might work, but the film was finished before the pandemic.
Aussie Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation,” “A Million Little Pieces” and the upcoming remake of “The Stand” does a fine American accent. But as Charlotte, her whispered vocal fry here, half-remembering the suicide of her mother, dealing with the deflated but menacing boyfriend (Ben Schnetzer) she’s trying to move on from, mumbling off the attempts to explain himself from her police chief father (P.J. Marshall) is sleep-inducing tedium itself.
That boyfriend is a poet in a pick-up truck, I tell you what — “All this sweat, this humidity…when I felt myself melt into you…I just needed to stand in your light again.”
Charlotte tends to bring that out in people, as in her BFF Olivia (Madalyn Cline), who philosophizes that “sometimes, we need people to not listen to us.”
Our heroine is in a muted, slack-jawed shock over what’s going on here and over Monroeville way. She brushes off Joe, keeps clumsy-flirt Will (Jack Kilmer) at arm’s length and tries to get these shallow ditzes to care.
“We saw Daphne on her last night on Earth.”
Her friends are all “It’ll be over before you know it,” in Bud Light denial.
Raboy tells much of the story after dark, and some scenes are so poorly lit that you can’t tell who Charlotte is sitting with in this car or that truck. Extreme closeups keep Young front and center, the only one meriting light in many of those moments.
The odd “Fi, fie, foe fum” thumping footsteps and screams from the forest should ratchet up the suspense, but dangle here like unanswered questions. Is this some psychic reckoning for careless kids, some payback for a perceived wrong, maybe committed by someone they all know?
From the look of things, our writer-director has no more grasp of the answers to the questions he half-asks than the viewer does.
MPA Rating: unrated, murder, teen drinking, smoking, suggestions of sex
Cast: Odessa Young, Ben Schnetzer, Jack Kilmer, Madalyn Cline, P.J. Marshall
Credits: Scripted and directed by David Raboy. A Vertical Entertainment release.
He was using a Beretta which M took from him and replaced with Ian Fleming’s iconic choice of firearm in “Dr. No.” The Hollywood Reporter typist who wrote this up must have never seen a Bond film, leaving out the “K” in “PPK” twice. Got $250k to bid on it?
From Kyle’s childhood onward, his best friend Mike’s been there for him. Or with him. And here they are, in the Pyrnees, cycling on the day before Kyle’s wedding to his French love, Ava (Judith Godrèche), the groom and his best friend/best man.
It doesn’t matter that Kyle’s out of shape and on a borrowed bike, gasping up each incline. Well, maybe it does. Mike’s got some news.
“Kyle, I slept with Ava.”
“Whu–I’m gonna f—ing KILL you (gasp gasp)!”
“I know. That’s why I waited for the kill.”
Has there even been a more maddeningly-amusing riff on toxic brohood than “The Climb?” Don’t answer that. It’s too early.
You haven’t seen all the relationships Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) jams a monkey wrench into, leaving Kyle (Kyle Marvin) alone and friendless — until somehow, he forgives Kyle and the whole process starts over.
Covino also directed “The Climb,” and he and Marvin co-wrote it, pairing up this guy “everybody loves” with this other guy whom only Kyle loves, the one he pedals inclines with, the one who keeps messing with Kyle’s relationships with women and family, the implication goes, all through life.
Kyle is a nebbish, a bit of a pushover, the sort who “always thinks about other people first,” his mother (Talia Balsam) laments. “People take advantage of that.”
“People” like Mike? Mom doesn’t see things quite that way. That’s why she invited drunken, broken Mike to Kyle’s big family Christmas get together, the one that follows their big Thanksgiving get together.
Maybe Mom has in mind, with Dad (George Wendt) her compliant partner, Marissa (Gayle Rankin, outstanding), Kyle’s college sweetheart, the one he wants to marry some time after the whole Ava thing went South. Maybe that’s why she invited the impulse-control issues Mike to come and do to this coupling what he did to the last one.
Will she and a very drunken Mike get in the way of what Kyle wants, busting up his relationship with a bossy woman who insists Kyle stand up to his overbearing family?
Marvin and Covino break their script up into chapters — “I’m Sorry” and “Let Go” and “Stop It” and so on. This practice has become commonplace, a lazy way for filmmakers to show how they organized their movie on note cards on a bulletin board, a pointless “show your work” Screenwriting 101 crutch.
They added four or five sequences to their short film “The Climb” to turn this into a feature. The chapter headings only underline that process and let us see that the opening scene, the one they turned into a short (and a proof-of-concept plug for the feature) is the strongest.
But all the episodes themselves are invariably funny and revealing. The co-dependency is the organizing theme, but the subtexts include Kyle’s loss of free will (others “know best”) and Mike’s ineptitude — picking a fight with a French driver, picking a fight over a moving truck, disrupting weddings, a funeral and parties with his heart-on-his-sleeve and/or drinks in-his-system clumsiness.
The co-stars/co-writers may have a couple they want us to root for here, in the classic rom-com sense. But there’s wriggle room for us to make our own choice, to fret over the choices Mike denies Kyle the chance to make.
Rankin (of TV’s “GLOW”) is the stand-out performer, although Covino (TV’s “All Wrong”) does well by this lovable lout you kind of love to hate.
Which is why “The Climb” works. Love him or hate him, root for Mike to make Kyle’s life better, or for Kyle to kick him out of it, “The Climb” invites us along for the ride and keeps our interest, whether or not love or bromance, as they say, finds a way.
MPA Rating: R for language, sexual content, some nudity and brief drug use
Cast: Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, Judith Godrèche, Talia Balsam and George Wendt.
Credits: Directed by Micahel Angelo Covino, script by Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino. A Sony Classics release.’
The rise of “Stranger Things” and the revival of Stephen King’s “It” inspired “They Reach,” a horror tale/period piece in which kid are under threat, and take responsibility for their own deliverance.
It’s a case study in the difference between smart writing with pathos and wit, and witless imitation, between “barely adequate” child actors and ones with charisma that the camera catches.
A prologue shows us father-son demonic possession researchers stumbling into something awful in 1969. Dad’s copy of the “Sanguinium Demonium” (book) should have protected them. Or his .38 snub nose. But no.
Ten years later, science “nerd” and tinkerer Jessica (Mary Madaline Roe) stumbles across the reel to reel recorder that that earlier team recorded their encounter with. Trying to fix it, she cuts herself. Blood is spilled and…damn — a Demonic Nagra tape recorder!
Whispers start in the house. Everybody starts seeing things.
Luckily Jessica has 13 year-old pals, noble and true — Sam (Morgan Chandler) and Cheddar (Edan Campbell.
Quick, grab your Spider Bikes! “To the library! They have these things called BOOKS.”
Yes, that’s real dialogue from this dawdling, dumb dive into demons — how to get them, how to “send them back” through “the doorway.”
A Couple of passable effects show us that “doorway.” Characters are yanked out of the frame, with gooey fake blood splattered all over everything and everyone left behind in the camera frame.
Period touches include kids singing “I Wanna be Sedated,” and my favorite — a ’70s Dodge Charger smoking when it starts, “dieseling” when they try to shut it off.
Just like new!
There would be no movie without overt “borrowings” from Stephen King. That’s not the worst idea. “No movie,” I mean.
The one interesting character, mistakenly assuming what they’re dealing with is “a werewolf” and thus insistent a “silver bullet” will solve their troubles, has the most telling name.
What is Cheddar, kids? How’s it describe this movie?
Movie Nation 