With Regal shuttered and AMC almost out of cash, big chunks of the country are about to be without moviegoing even as an option. Not that most people consider it safe, even without a big uptick in COVID cases.
Some cities and states have theaters closed by mandate, some will have to re-close. Having written versions of “The Last Drive In” at five different newspapers over the years, I can vouch for the fact that barring the new “drive in boom,” date night will have few to zero options for cheap, safe entertainment.
So let’s mask up while we still can. You never know when that next chance will present itself.
This is an old Carmike that sold to Epic that AMC picked up as a cheap first run (AMC Classic) in the vacation village of New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
Anyone worried that watching how their favorite K-Pop confection is prepared for world music domination will spoil “Blackpink” for them can rest easy. “BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky” doesn’t dive deep into the latest South Korean YG Entertainment-assembled pop creation.
It’s a superficial skim across the surface of these young women, groomed for stardom from their early teens, about as deep as their multi-lingual singles — “Ice Cream,” “Whistle” and that thumb-through-the-thesaurus, “Ddu-Du, Ddu-Du.”
Caroline Suh’s plainly officially-sanctioned “up close and personal” profile of the four 20ish singers may get a half-admission that this one regrets “memories” that might have been created by living with her family and going to high school, that another one might have worked up the temerity to ask permission to work with a different producer for a possible solo project.
Their producer, Teddy Park, can talk about them having drilled in “the techniques and tools that they need for the next ten years,” because that’s their shelf life — tops.
But while each individual comes off as distinct...ish, none of us are that interesting or that distinct at that age. And having lived in a bubble, trained at YG’s “academy,” living in a dorm for 4-6 years before being assembled and unleashed on Korea, Asia and then the world, living and traveling and performing together, never allowed to smoke, drink or “get a tattoo,” you can’t help but get the impression that “Light Up the Sky” isn’t remotely as informative or revealing as a movie about them after all this is over — maybe one made four years from now.
That’s no criticism of Jisoo, “Unnie,” the “older sister” of the group, of the blonde, guitar and keyboard-playing Rose’, of Lisa from Thailand or Jennie, the Korean New Zealander. They’ve been drilled to stand out only in that girl group/boy-band way. And in this case, they’re not even distinct in that regard, no “Sporty Spice” or “the rebel” or what have you.
Little hints are all we get of what their lives have really been like — boarding school Down Under, then selected for stardom, 14 hour workdays rehearsing and recording and trying out all during their teens.
That moment when a very young Miley Cyrus complained that her backup dancers almost dropped her right off the stage, captured in the “Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert” film, and having her parents shrug it off was more revealing than anything here.
Not having personal lives, and being younger than Katy Perry, there are no weepie meltdowns over the pressure or a lost romance as we saw in “Katy Perry: Part of Me.” Blackpink is as covered-up as rapper and former 1TYM (K-pop) member turned producer Teddy Park, always seen in a mask, here.
The film is built around their North American breakthrough at Coachella, although much of it was shot afterwards, sort of a “Here’s who they are now that you’ve been introduced to the music and choreography of their act” quickie.
“Light Up the Sky” is limited to the four women and Teddy Park as interview subjects, with a little interaction — a pilates instructor “friend” here, a makeup artist or outside producer there.
They go through “fittings,” where their wardrobe has been narrowed down (limiting choices) for them to “select” and “be creative.”
Their precision on stage doesn’t hide lip-synching any more than their revealing outfits and perfect twerks, bumps and grinds obscure how utterly sexless it all is. It’s like that infamous moment in Rolling Stone Magazine history, when sexless pop idol David Cassidy revealed a little pubic hair on the cover and ended his pop idol reign.
“Sexy but sexless” is what sells to this audience. Always has.
Hearing from their fans, how great it is that “they’re best friends” and all makes you long for the day when those fans figure out “It’s not like they have a choice.”
Speaking as a guy outside of their target demo, I’m always as interested in how the sausage is made. Over the years, I’ve covered Britney Spears as she transitioned from Disney kid to pop tart, interviewed Maurice Starr (NKOTB etc) and his more criminal copycat Lou Pearlman, covered NSync in court as they sought freedom from their indentured servitude contracts.
So what’s left out of “Light Up the Sky” is a LOT more interesting than anything we’re shown here. It’d have to be. Because even by the standards of “officially approved” pop phenom bios of the Bieber/Miley variety, this is weak tea.
MPAA Rating: TV-14, a bit of skin, popping and locking and shimmy shimmy shakes, etc.
Cast: Jennie Kim, Jisoo Kim, Lalisa Manoban, Roseanne “Rose'” Park, Teddy Park
Credits: Directed by Caroline Suh. A Netflix release.
It’s not that the ending of “Painter” is a drab, unemotional and unexciting anti-climax. It’s that too much of what comes before this art world thriller’s finale is flat, rote and conventional to the point of predictable.
Cory Wexler Grant’s debut feature earns good intentions points for casting character actress Betsy Randle as its anti-heroic heroine, an arts world “type” — the “patron” who gets in entirely too deep.
The “Boy Meets World” and “Girl Meets World” veteran narrates in a kind of “Sunset Boulevard/Bright Lights, Big City” remove, a charmless all-knowing cynic observing the lives she’s entwined, the “world” (art) she sees as false, the manipulation she figures is her due.
But as wealthy Angelino Joanne sinks her hooks into mild-mannered mediocrity Aldis Brown (Eric Ladin), the patronizing Joanne lets us know that making this painter her “creation” and a star won’t be enough, succeed or fail.
She is a reliable narrator in that she shows her cards in voice over, an unreliable one because we can see this colorless Midwesterner isn’t worthy of championing.
After all, she herself has told us that “genius,” long-reserved for that “once in a generation” talent,” has “lost all of its power.” Can she, as a collector, using it to describe Aldis make it generally accepted as true? Can she be trusted to recognize “that convergence of talent and timing” that makes a star?
And that brings up more questions. As we see the breathless “gallery show opening” types utter their “the color, the DEPTH” inanities, we wonder if we’re being set up for a satire of the art world’s fickle fakery, the poseurs passed off as “genius” because “I SAID so?” Or is something less surprising and more sinister in play?
“Painter” begins with a “30 under 30” show where Aldis might have been lost in the mix, another lowball sale, another chance to make his mark lost. Joanne, however, browbeats the gallery owner (Susan Anton) into selling her his painting at four times its asking price.
She takes an interest, narrates her notion that he will be her “creation.” But his friends are warning him. “She’s your Sam Wagstaff.” She’s a collector, patron and champion with something “else” in mind.
Aldis, being a cornfed Nebraskan, doesn’t know who they’re talking about. He lets her buy his work and gets talked into moving his garage-rental studio into her mansion.
“You need somebody to believe in your, push you.”
She can do that. And when he’s not looking, she’s confronting his sometime girlfriend (Cinthya Carmona), warning her away, that Aldis doesn’t need “frivolous diversions like you.” Joanne listens to his complaints about a much more successful rival (Casey Deidrick) a little too intently.
And as her intended results start to pay off with attention and a one-man show, she throws her weight around.
Randle may put across privilege and authority as she purrs through the narration, but she never gets across the menace the role needs.
The script gives Ladin few opportunities to expand on his character’s general under-reaction to what should seem like an obvious threat or infuriating annoyance. The picture and her performance rob us of that.
The time-lapse sequences of a painter at work add authority to the proceedings. But as the art world this is sort of sending up recedes into the background and Grant tries to throw us off the scent by being less predictable, interest fades.
Narrowing the focus to Joanne, her mania and her “secrets” makes it more boring.
There’s promise here. But that higher end of expectations would have been for this to be a solid genre thriller, not a dawdling, dull drip-painting of a tale.
“Painter” deadens the climax so badly that you almost welcome the anti-climax that follows.
A plagiarist steals from a single source, a “genius” from many, so the old saying goes.
But that dates from the days before cut-and-paste software. So there’s no wriggle room in that adage for Joe Ballarini, author of and screenwriter who adapted the book “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.”
It’s “Adventures in Babysitting” meets “Monster House” with “Harry Potter” touches, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as its plot-hook and a hint of “Beetlejuice” in its villain.
Cut. And paste.
It’s a kid-friendly mash-up of limited imagination and endless exposition. Boring as all get out, in other words.
Tamara Smart stays on brand as Kelly Ferguson, aka “Monster Girl.” No, her Rhode Island (actually PLAINLY the Pacific Northwest) classmates didn’t name her that for her acting credits (“The Worst Witch,” “Are You Afraid of the Dark”). She got that label for being a girl who swore she was attacked by monsters when she was five.
Now, trapped babysitting the fraidy-cat son of her mom’s “Ice Queen” boss (Tamsen McDonough is dressed as The Ice Queen for Halloween–hilarious.), Kelly has just enough time to bond over what might be under his bed or in his closet with little Jacob (Ian Ho) when the monsters they both kind of believe are real grab him.
Gosh, and his Mom said “No scary movies, NO trick-or-treaters, and KEEP JACOB SAFE!”
Calling 9-11 doesn’t help. It’s Halloween, after all.
Lucky for Monster Girl that Riot Grrrl She Warrior Liz LeRue (Oona Laurence of “The Beguiled” and “Pete’s Dragon” rolls up on her motorbike, a baby in her backpack, to save the day. Or night.
She reluctantly introduces Kelly to The Order of Babysitters, an underworld of “Ghostbusters” blobs stealing kids, the book “Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting” and the evil plot of Grand Guignol to steal enough kids so that he “run the WORLD.”
Tom Felton of Potterworld vamps up Grand G, “stealer of dreams, bringer of nightmares.” He sings, he schemes, he takes custody of Jacob and if he can just get him to doze off and have a really good nightmare…
There’s all this monster-hunting tech and all these global babysitters organized to help with the hunt (VERY inclusive), and all these “toadies,” creatures like the Shadow Monster and Vampire Rabbit, Cloud Serpants and assorted members of “The Boogie People.”
Indya Moore makes quite the impression as the Mother of all Cat Ladies.
Naturally, they have to follow clues through Brown University and a local high school party, make time with Kelly’s idea of a hottie and deal with a mean girl.
“Since the dawn of time, every Basic Girl who’s thought she’s hot has gone for the cat costume.”
Not much that even approaches a funny line in this script, alas.
The plot is more cluttered than interesting, the effects dated but passable, the kid acting is indifferent most of the time, with Smart better at playing “the smart girl” than somebody facing her demons, fearing she’s lost a little boy to the Prince of Nightmares. Laurence isn’t much better.
Felton never lets us think he’s punching the timeclock, setting a good example that the kids aren’t up to following.
Realizing this “meh” of a movie was directed by “Tank Girl” veteran Rachel Talalay is startling and sad, until you remember how much that sucked as well. But with all this “nightmare monsters” lore and tech and effects, I could totally see “Babysitter’s Guide” becoming a Netflix franchise.
MPAA Rating: TV-PG, scary bits
Cast: Tamara Smart, Oona Laurence, Ian Ho and Tom Felton.
Credits: Directed by Rachel Talalay, script by Joe Ballarini, based on his book. A Netflix release.
A lover on the lam, a missing “sucker,” body parts in a lake, an abused escort-wife, an illegal immigrant smitten with her, a corrupt bureaucrat, a murderous mobster he’s in dutch to, a clumsy-nosy-pushy cop, a family trapped in debt and dead-end jobs — and a misplaced Louis Vuitton carry-on.
How all those “Beasts Clawing at Straws” tie together is the mystery at the heart of this thoroughly entertaining debut feature from the Korean director Kim Yong-Hoon.
Money and the lack of it drives the film, a bloody and yet ever-so-tidy adaptation of a novel by Japanese writer Keisuke Sone. The film may break into chapters — “Debt,” “Sucker, “Shark,” etc. But there’s pleasure in its disorganized organization.
The plot is non-linear, a mobius strip that loops in on itself. And the characters? They’re a collection of yin-and-yang opposites — pairs.
Two women, one a femme fatale (Jeon Do-Yeon), the other (Shin Hyun Been) a prostitute beaten by her husband each night; two men, one a family man (Bae Song-Woo) trying to keep his daughter in college and his mean, violent, senile mother from hurting his wife, the other a port officer (Jung Woo-Sung ) in the dutch to a mobster, drinking alone to forget his problems because he’s lost his lover.
Mi-ran (Shin) takes her beatings at home. But trip to the brothel is all it takes for the young illegal Chinese immigrant Jin Tae (JungGa-Ram) to become smitten. He’ll help her with this brute husband problem.
But he runs over the wrong guy with his car, and that knocks this port city world off its axis. We’ve got our suspicions about this bag left behind at the gym where sad, weary Jung-man (Bae) works, and fret about what the monstrous mobster Mr. Park (Jeong Man-Sik) is capable of, with regards to port officer Tae-young, and everybody else I mean, the man employs a literal monster (Bae Jin-woong) hitman who “enjoys intestines.” And not the ones from pigs, either.
And then the missing lover, the femme fatale, the brothel boss Yeon-Hee (Jeon, in a scorching turn) shows up, leggy and lusty, and murderously mercenary. All bets are off from this moment on.
Kim Yong-Hoon keeps the picture on the move and on its feet as we follow this or that character into and sometimes out of peril, skipping through a timeline with only that damned Vuitton bag to keep them, and us, focused.
The tone veers from righteous outrage to comic romp, with flashes of jaw-dropping violence filling the third act. It’s challenging and fun.
And if you don’t find the twisty story enough of a mind-game, try taking notes and reviewing it. The subtitling is less than complete, characters are barely identified, here and there, if at all. The spelling of the character names varies in the subtitles, the closing credits and the Internet Movie Database. YOU try keeping all that straight.
But you don’t have to. As the old Korean adage says, “Just go with it,” and even if you guess where it’ll end up, the circuitous way “Beasts Clawing at Straws” gets there is never less than pure thriller-watching pleasure.
Remember that time Eric Clapton got up on stage and snapped “Get the wogs out, get the coons out” of his native Britain?
That time David Bowie said “Britain is ready for a fascist leader?”
“Good old days,” right?
Adam Ant using Nazi agitprop to launch his career. Clapton and Rod Stewart singing the praises of the white supremacist/Nazi “National Front,” a fringe political party that threatened to go mainstream before Thatcherism turned Britain hard right without the spoken-out-loud bigotry.
“White Riot” is a documentary trip down a dark corner of Britain’s Memory Lane, the country’s mid-70s flirtation with racist fascism, and the small “underground” group, Rock Against Racism, that used a fanzine, effective labeling, activist concerts and protest marches to stem the tide at a time when punk ruled, and punk, beloved by skinheads of all stripes, could “go either way.”
It was the brainchild of Red Saunders. He was then a colorful fringe figure from the music industry who saw what was happening, and after stirring up a stink with an eviscerating “open letter” to Clapton, King of the Rock’s Cultural Appropriators and “rock’s biggest colonialist,” a letter than ran in ALL the popular music mags, started the ball rolling to enlist musicians and their fans to fight back.
Rubika Shah’s documentary uses extensive archival footage, everything from concerts and protest marches that turned into near-riots when racists and anti-racists met, to vintage interviews in which stars of the day let everybody know, as the old song Pete Seeger made famous, “Which Side Are You On?”
“White Riot” takes its name from a song by The Clash, the most prominent group to align itself with “RAR,” as its organizers called Rock Against Racism. But before The Clash came along, performers and fans were figuring out that Britain had a problem.
Britain’s post-colonialist/post-war history of bringing in “foreigners” from its colonies had reshaped the country, and re-colored it. A nation whose entertainers were still making racist cracks in sitcoms and still putting on blackface for song and dance numbers well into the ’70s was ripe the rise of the National Front.
Saunders and associates like “Irate” Kate Webb talk about freeing skinheads from the NF, about turning punk away from its skinhead/nationalist-fascist street-fighter roots.
“Our job was to peel away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika underneath,” Saunders says.
With no money, and rarely having big name musician to headline their shows (Steel Pulse, 999, SHAM 69, X-Ray Spex), with a magazine that looked pieced together in someone’s garage (because it was), Rock Against Racism became the button many a kid wanted on her or his denim concert-going jacket.
There’s little nostalgia from the fresh interviews collected here, and plenty of fire in the vintage ones. Kids complaining about racist National Front-sympathizing police, everyday bullying that could be life-threatening — the footage may look dated, but the message — delivered in print, on buttons, in punk and reggae songs — feels as current as “the latest news from the BBC.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, street violence, profanity
Cast: Red Saunders, “Irate” Kate Webb, Pauline Black, Myataell Riley, Pervez Bilgrami, Joe Strummer and Tom Robinson
Credits: Directed by Rubika Shah, script by Ed Gibbs, Rubika Shah. A Film Movement+ release.
There are great films, and there are movies “of their moment.” Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is a bit of both.
Harrowing and cautionary, inspiring and thanks to a healthy splash of ironic wit, damned entertaining, it’s a movie about America then and “justice” then and now, and an emphatic reminder that the political civil war that seems to have come to a head under Donald Trump had its origins in a kangaroo court that “the whole world” was “watching.”
Sorkin, whose political and courtroom bonafides were established with “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men,” cast the eight (never seven) leftists accused of conspiring to start riots in 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention well, cast the legal counsels better and cast the perfect villain.
I can’t say how we’ll look on this all-star vehicle five years down the road. But for today, nearing an election in the most politically roiled and corpse-littered year America has had since Vietnam, “Chicago 7” is the movie that matters, the movie of the moment.
Sorkin sets up the rivalry between the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), led by Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and the Youth International Party of Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong).
He has wonderful actors embody their respective branches of the broader anti-Vietnam War-anti-fascist/pro-civil rights movement, and gives them glorious lines to make their case.
“Dr. King is dead,” Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, terrific) thunders to his office in explaining his decision to come speak at those 1968 protests. “Martin’s dead. Malcolm’s dead. Medgar’s dead. Bobby’s dead. JESUS is dead. They tried it peacefully, we’re gonna try something else!”
Lifelong pacifist and conscientious objector David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) allies with Hayden to try and keep the peace and the focus on “ending the war.” That rubs against the broader “revolutionary” aims of protest clown princes Rubin and Hoffman. But when Hayden’s arrested, who will bail him out? You, Abbie?
“I don’t carry money, do you?” he asks Dellinger.
“I do,” the older man snipes. “I’m a grown man.”
We’re introduced to the prosecutor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a meeting that reveals the conspiracy Nixon’s thin-skinned and partisan attorney general John Mitchell set up to bring the protest movement leaders to trial — for conspiracy.
The movie hustles us into court, and between witnesses and court motions and arguments, flashbacks (using reenactments blended with shocking documentary footage) take us back to the clashes between tens of thousands of protestors and police, all there for a convention, Walter Cronkite points out on live TV, “about to begin in a police state.”
And in that court we see a “system” twisted, manipulated and perverted by Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, venomously imperious and confused), who can’t keep names straight, can’t control his court and whose biases are obvious from the beginning, so much so that Rubin and Abbie blurt “OVER-ruled” and “SUSTAINED” before the judge can get every pro-prosecution ruling out of his mouth.
Judge Hoffman’s hostility, raining “contempt” citations on the defense — particularly the un-represented Seale, shown as the real “victim” of all this — gets so out of hand that he blurts “sustained” out before it has ever occurred to the prosecution to raise an objection at facts that undermine its case.
Oscar winner Mark Rylance stands out in the cast for reviving the reputation of celebrated/vilified defender-of-causes attorney William Kunstler, a performance of wry whimsy and barely-contained outrage. Rylance fumes and twinkles like the master craftsman he is, swaying the viewer and maybe the judge and jury. .
Cohen’s Hoffman, seen beginning his years of college campus “stand-up” lectures, recreating the protests and the trial, is hilarious, smart and committed, quick with a quip and yet capable of startling empathy. He goofs around over gaining protest “permits,” but he wants that spotlight, for himself and “the revolution.”
“There’s no place to be right now but IN it!”
But it is Sorkin’s film’s sense of “right now” that sticks with you. If we’ve re-learned anything over the past couple of years it’s that yes, cops often start riots, that the police lie to make their case, that they hide their badges when they’re planning to do violence they don’t expect to be held accountable for. Sorkin shows this happening in 1968, and we grimace at how many images just like these we’ve seen in 2020.
A former attorney general takes the stand to remind us that this office is not SUPPOSED to be the lawyer for “the president.”
There were no cell phones back then, although there were enough cameras around capturing the ugliness and violence enacted by The State that the protestors could rightly chant, “The whole WORLD is watching.” If we didn’t learn from what we saw with our own eyes then, Sorkin reminds us, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it again now.
MPAA Rating: R, violence, profanity, drug references
Cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Eddie Redmayne, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Carroll Lynch, Jeremy Strong, Michael Keaton and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. A Netflix release.
Movie Nation 