Robert De Niro is KING of the box office. Hundreds of Regal cinemas closed, and it still managed a $3.6 million weekend.
Almost impressive, given the circumstances.
“Tenet” has been over over a month, and lost hundreds of screens thanks to the Regal closure. It still earned another $2.1 million and would have gotten closer to the $50 million domestic had Regal not shut down. The film made almost all of its money abroad.
“Unhinged” inched closer to $20 million, and would have cleared it had Regal not given up.
@ERCboxoffice) Tweeted: WB’s TENET lost 507 theaters in its 6th weekend, dropping off -22% w/ $2.1M in 2,215 venues, $48M total. And for those keeping track…Nolan’s films was pushed out of the #1 spot, after a 5-week run on top, by THE WAR WITH GRANDPA ($3.6M). https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1315318566107840512?s=20
If you’re missing “The Good Lord Bird” on Showtime, you’re missing one of the epic TV events of the fall.
Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard’s seven episode take on James McBride’s picaresque novel about the run-up to the Civil War, feels fresh and topical, furious, funny and crazed, a stunningly-detailed recreation of a divided America and the colorful, charismatic figures who brought “the slavery issue” to a head.
Hawke takes the lead role of mad prophet Abolitionist John Brown in a story narrated by another of those unsophisticated sages immersed in the passing parade of history, a little “Forrest Gump” and a lot more “Little Big Man.”
Our narrator is the young slave Brown frees, Henry — or Henrietta as Brown sees “her” — played by newcomer Joshua Caleb Johnson.
“America will never have peace until we have dealt with slavery,” the boy dressed as a girl hears “the Captain” or “The Old Man” say.
From the minute Brown gets Henry’s father killed in the Free Staters vs. Red Shirt slavers of “Bleeding Kansas,” the kid gets an up close eyeful of Brown’s commitment, fanaticism and violence, and a taste of his utter incompetence in military matters.
“The Lord puts forth his hand and touches AAaallll evil,” Hawke’s Brown thunders, “and KILLS it!”
By 1858, Brown has come to the conclusion that the time is right to “free the slaves” with blood. To make the slavers “eat lead, grape and powder.”
The boy Brown nicknames “Little Onion,” mistaking him a teen girl sees. As “lyin’ come natural to all Negroes in slave times,” Henrietta goes along with it.
Henrietta witnesses mayhem in Kansas, hiding at a brothel with a prosperous prostitute (Natasha Marc), meeting future Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Wyatt Russell), and travels with Brown to Rochester to hear and learn at the feet of Frederick Douglas (Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton”), marveling at the great orator’s idealism, intelligence (too smart and sane to “join” Brown in the field), and quasi-polygamous home living arrangements.
There’s Harriet Tubman (Zainab Jah) in Canada, the “General” of the Underground Railroad, endorsing Brown’s final mad gamble.
At every step of the way, the child narrator listens to what confidantes like Bob (Hubert Point-Du Jour) say about Brown and his tendency to “pray” rather than thoughtfully command, to “plan” based on an idealized vision of “The Negro slave” eager to join his planned war to end slavery.
“We ride East while the harlot of slavery sleeps,” he commands. “The Old Man’s nuttier’n a squirrel turd,” mutters Bob.
The violent, chaotic early episodes show the quarrelsome collaboration of Brown and his sons (Ellar Coltrane of “Boyhood” reunites with Hawke), debating theology and strategy with a fanatic who is sure The Lord is on his side and thus not likely to die before his work is done.
Incompetent “battles” are joined, mostly lost, but Brown never fails to look the part in that famous mural, “Tragic Prelude” — wild-eyed, single-minded, terrifying.
Henrietta learns to read, and grapples with the patronizing nature of the original “white savior” figure to black people, standing up for himself even if he’s still hiding behind a dress.
The cast includes Orlando Jones, David Morse, Keith David and Steve Zahn in chewy, single episode supporting roles, and directors from Kevin Hooks (“Passenger 57”) and Albert Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) to Haifaa Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) give the episodes authentic action and drive, or closely-observed studies of the circuitous, cautious path slaves had to navigate just to survive a system bent on working them to death or killing them for straying.
Hawke and Diggs are the standouts in the cast, with the former hitting home runs every time he takes on a project these days and Diggs fast translating his stage stardom onto screen leading man charisma.
The performances, the production’s gritty authenticity and the high stakes struggle mixed with droll observations about the committed but flawed people engaged in it makes “The Good Lord Bird” the TV event of the fall, and one of the best limited series of the year.
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Joshua Caleb Johnson, Daveed Diggs, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Natasha Marc, Keith David, David Morse, Orlando Jones and Steve Zahn.
Credits: Created by Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard, based on the James McBride novel. A Showtime release.
So, what can we learn about Malaysia from today’s “Around the World with Netflix” offering, the action comedy “All Because of You?”
For an Islamic country with laws against homosexuality, their cinema isn’t above making sissy jokes.
That part of the world’s passion for exceptional service is expressed every time the effeminate manager (Namron) of the Bayu Bay uses his catchphrase in English.
“FIVE star!”
American wrestling has its fans there.
“Can you smerr what de Rock ees cookink!”
And the fight choreography isn’t a strong suit, despite being close to the world’s great martial arts cinema in Thailand, Hong Kong, etc. I’ve never seen so many obvious “stage punches” in my life. At one point, the filmmakers resort to animation to cover up this problem, the ultimate “We’ll fix it in post (production)” solution.
The first two acts of this miss-or-hit comedy set up the romance that isn’t coming off. Bellman Aiman (Hairul Azreen, a convincing lump) is clueless at all the attention his gets from longtime “friend” Jane, the chef (Janna Nick).
Aiman and the rest of the staff fret over the boss’s “five STAR” edict, struggle to master English to accommodate their clientele, but flirt shamelessly with the well-heeled and often gorgeous guests. Those hot young “influencers” led by Sofia (Sophia Albarakbah) are no exception.
Still, it’s the only place the popular film star Jasmine and super rich Westerner Tengku Iksander (Josiah Hogan) and his vast army of bodyguards would stay.
The film takes an hour to set up what we can see coming twenty minutes in. Some rich guest is going to attract the wrong kind of attention. Somebody is going to try something violent.
The last third of the movie has its share of bullet-riddled mayhem, never daring to show blood. But as the hapless, goofy staff tries to rally and fight back, the villains keep breaking off and saying “I got this” at each new “threat” — villains who stop using their guns to end “fights.”
Odd, that. That’s how villains become inmates.
The violence and comedy don’t blend as smoothly as you’d like. Shrieking — sometimes in Malay, sometimes in English — “Oh my God, he’s DEAD. He made COFFEE for me yesterday!” doesn’t make us forget we just saw somebody gunned down.
The language barrier jokes extend even to the lines people who have “mastered” English get wrong. It’s not all “Yes, I eat you” when somebody wants to say “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.” But close.
I cackled at some of the action beats, the way Jane wails like a police siren when she’s grabbed, bits of slapstick here and there.
They make good use of a lovely location, and there’s a polish to the production that the fights lack. It’s a film very much on a par with the slickest international cinema made in the genre.
If “All Because of You” wasn’t so obvious and corny, if the acting was on a higher plane, if it had better fights and bigger laughs, it might have come off.
She was the wittiest of professional contrarians, breathlessly passionate about each new love, venomously vituperative about each offense to her cinematic sensibilities.
Pauline Kael was film criticism’s original “hanging judge,” the critic’s critic in a pre-Internet age when there were fewer movies and far, far fewer people reviewing them, a pioneering woman in a mostly-man’s world who stood out, set the tone and influenced generations of reviewers and filmmakers, for good and ill.
“What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” is a mostly-flattering remembrance of the long-time New Yorker critic who reigned — underpaid and only in print six months out of the year — over decades of our experiences and memories of movies, twenty-four years in all.
With the upcoming David Fincher film “Mank,” about the less-heralded screenwriter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” coming out, now is a good time to revisit Kael’s take on that film, her infamous “Raising Kane” essay which wrote Herman J. Mankiewicz back into cinema history, and her influence over criticism and the culture she thrived in.
“What She Said” is now on Film Movement+. And although it glosses over “Raising Kane,” which Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich called a 1971 “attempt to assassinate Orson,” and neglects to mention how further scholarship proved Kael wrong in most important regards of “authorship,” it’s a marvelous memory of the writer famous for her New Yorker work, for 13 books of essays and reviews, who polished her art doing free reviews for public radio, “performing” her writing and teaching herself to “make my sentences breathe.”
Even if you’d seen the movie and didn’t agree with her, her review could and can still make you feel “you’re seeing (the film) for the first time,” music and culture critic Greil Marcus says.
Even if you were sure of your argument, “the thing that made you mad,” Quentin Tarantino says, was her insight into something so obvious that you’d missed which “ruined the movie for you.”
Being a magazine critic, publishing after newspaper and TV reviewers had weighed in on a film, she set herself up as that ever-against-the-grain contrary voice. “Bonnie & Clyde” was widely panned, but she called it “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate’…The audience is alive to it.”
“Last Tango” she raved about, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” she ridiculed, “2001” she panned. She hated Kubrick, “a strict and exacting German professor,” and others felt her wrath, first film to last.
She championed Spielberg and Lynch, Altman and Demme and De Palma, Coppola and Scorsese, and courted acolytes — “Paulettes” — critics who would amplify the echo of her influence.
Her reviews were given to hyperbole, pro or con, filled with personal anecdotes and memories from what original “Paulette,” the critic-turned-screenwriter/director Paul Schrader calls her “stunning recall” of movies and scenes she hadn’t seen in decades. She was the last living critic to have a memory of movies from the silent era, seen as a little girl growing up in California.
“What She Said” samples her acrid radio reviews for Berkeley’s KPFA in the late 1950s and early 1960s — “The big picture is almost necessarily the bad picture,” she said of the early years of widescreen (CinemaScope, etc) film. Impressively well-read, only she would approach “Lawrence of Arabia,” widely accepted as a masterpiece then and now, as a movie that remade “my” T.E. Lawrence into an iconic “narcissist and a sadist…I wish it had never been made.”
The documentary tracks Kael’s rise, with lots of testimony from daughter Gina James, who was eyewitness to everything her single-mom (before that was accepted in society) went through. Yes, critics are “judgemental.” Kael “couldn’t NOT be critical,” of her daughter or others.
Like anyone, she could be thin-skinned when the roles were reversed. As much droll delight as she takes in reading (on the radio) her hate mail on the air, it always stung.
She grew so powerful in the mid-70s that she overstepped her bounds, pushing for Coppola to cut “Ride of the Valkyries” from “Apocalypse Now” pre-release, selling her soul to professional time-suck Warren Beatty, who paid her in a production job with Paramount. She’s given credit for getting the studio to take a chance on David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” here, although credit hog Mel Brooks would probably laugh at that.
Sarah Jessica Parker reads from Kael’s reviews throughout the documentary, others read the thank-you notes from Jessica Lange, courtly massaging notes from Woody Allen and Kevin Bacon and hate letters from Gregory Peck and George Roy Hill.
Peck blamed her for taking away precious years from his working life, Ridley Scott swore off reviews after she “was so wrong” about his “Blade Runner.” David Lean admitted to being so depressed after an encounter with her at a New York Critics Circle event that he all but quit film. Her “cruel” side is discussed by New York friends and competitors.
But there was a generous side, too, which I experienced first-hand. I met her on my first trip to The New York Film Festival — she was sitting a row or two ahead of me, and coughing so much during a screening that I gave her a cough drop, only recognizing her (Munchkin short) when she thanked me after the movie.
Whenever I was writing a newspaper piece on a legendary filmmaker from the past, I’d try to get her on the phone for a quote — nobody did better blurbs than Kael. It was a circuitous process, thanks to her six months on/six months off job at the New Yorker. But they’d dutifully pass on the phone message, and even if she had no particular enthusiasm for Garbo favorite, silent film (“Flesh and the Devil”) and early sound era icon Clarence Brown (“The Yearling”), or others, she’d return the call.
The portrait of her in “What She Said” may lean too far in celebrating her, and I was disappointed in the thinness of the treatment of that defining “Kane” essay (I wanted this to be homework for “Mank”). But writer-director Rob Garver has gotten at the essence of the woman — a frustrated playwright who turned criticism into “short stories and sonnets,” as one fan says.
Mistress of the mean blurb, she’d have done OK in the far more crowded reviewing landscape of today — online and on Youtube, etc.
But first, the “tough dame” would’ve had to learn to type.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, film sex scenes sampled
Cast: Pauline Kael, Paul Schrader, David Lean, Molly Haskell, Gina James, Alec Baldwin, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Carrie Rickey, John Guare, Quentin Tarantino, Greil Marcus and the voice of Sarah Jessica Parker.
Credits: Written and directed by Rob Garver. A Film Movement+ release.
The chief failing of your average horror collection is often such a movie’s greatest strength. Getting a coherent look and theme out of an anthology is a bear when you’re dealing with many directors, productions crews and “visions.”
A “VHS” or “ABCs of Death” or “Three Extremes” is only as good as the filmmakers invited to participate, and if they’re good, there are frights and we see ideas — sources of dreads and horror — we’ve never considered. But even the best of them are often a visual mess.
That’s what sets “The Mortuary Collection” apart. It’s more of a “Tales from the Crypt” package, all conceived, scripted and directed by Ryan Spindell, but more importantly all sharing a production designer and director of photography.
The thing looks just beautiful, and having the wonderful character actor Clancy Brown as a creepy old mortician “telling” the tales lends it gravitas and ups its cool quotient.
But the stories from Spindell, heretofore a maker of short films (including an earlier version of a “story” told here), are wildly uneven in tension, suspense and horror.
A couple carry the weight of being pitched as “morality tales,” with a lesson being taught, “comeuppance” being served.
One is of limited ambition and running time — basically an exercise in well-lit “creature feature” period piece. And a fifth “story” is the framing device, the old mortician (Brown) and “rhapsodist” (or rhapsode), who deals with the dead and the grieving, intoning a funeral oration and later giving a tour of the place with a young woman (Caitlin Custer) applying for a job there.
That framing story is florid, plummy and almost-amusing, as Montgomery Dark tells the applicant Sam stories from his Raven’s End (the town’s name) funeral home “archives of the various ways which clients have found themselves passing through our hallowed halls.”
They’re the stories of how people died and ended up there, Sam says, cutting to the chase.
So we see a woman nosing around the guest bathroom of a house hosting a 1950s party, perhaps a pickpocket or thief. But when she opens the medicine cabinet, something reaches out to grab her. Can she shut the door and keep it shut until somebody in the party hears her screams and comes to help?
A 1960s “client” was a frat bro (Jacob Elordi), lead Lothario at Sigma Delta fraternity at Raven’s End Tech. We meet him handing out condoms, “keeping everybody safe” at freshman orientation, assuring the coeds that “the patriarchy is dying” and that a sexual “revolution is coming,” and they’ll be in its vanguard.
Yeah, everything about that’s absurdly anachronistic, but never mind.
Then one (Ema Horvath) shows up who is as brazen as he is. It’s just that their night of unbridled (artfully blurry) sex has consequences. Horrific consequences.
A couple (Sarah Hay and Barak Hardley) marries “til death do us part” in the ’70s, only for the wife to become ill with the husband looking for ways to end her misery and his obligation. The helpful doctor (Mike C. Nelson, who plays the same doc in every story) gives him a way out.
Only things don’t go according to plan.
And then there’s the short film that Spindell has remade here, “The Babysitter Murders,” a jumbled assault within assaults involving an escaped murderer from the local asylum and babysitters. This ’80s tale is the only “story” to have a title, and sets the tone for the framing story/job interview “finale,” which is similarly muddled in terms of plot and “message.”
Brown plays a glorious archetype, and more scenes — or even voice-over — of him “telling” the stories would greatly add to the “fun” here. He could even tidy up the incoherence of some segments and underline the point of others.
“The world is not made of atoms. It’s made of stories!”
Because as gorgeous as “Mortuary Collection” is to look at, as seamlessly as the mismatched stories flow into one another, I have to say I agree with Sam’s review — delivered in character after one particularly unsatisfying tale of death.
“I was expecting something with a little more…substance.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, sex
Cast: Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer, Christine Kilmer, Jacob Elordi, Barak Hardley, Mike C. Nelson
Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Spindell. A Shudder release.
If you’re making a raunchy comedy titled “Girls’ Rules” about high school hotties embracing their sexuality, it might help if you had, you know, a woman directing it and women writing it.
Even if it’s an “American Pie” movie.
“American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules” has a winning young cast and a load of sass. And there’s actual romance mixed in with all the THOTs, sex toys, “skexing,” and the trials of an “unshuckable oyster.”
But it never rises above the crude, coarse crust of “America Pie” as it traffics in what a bunch of guys think girls like or are like or were like in high school.
A new generation of East Great Falls High teens are horning up and hooking up for senior year. And four friends Annie, Kayla, Michelle and Stephanie are wound-up to land their dream hook-up in time for the fall MORP (“prom” spelled backwards) dance.
But Annie (Madison Pettis) has clumsily failed to make the love connection with her longtime beau, who’s just left for college.
Michelle (Natasha Benham) has moved beyond human intercourse and into uh, appliances.
Kayla (Piper Curda) is having a great time with her boyfriend. But she’s paranoid about “the best sex ever,” and with good reason. Tim (Camaron Engles) isn’t exclusive.
And Steph (Lizze Broadway) may be lusted after by all the boys, feisty, sarcastic, self-confident and sporty. But she’s date-free most weekends.
Yes, the cleverest touch in this Blayne Weaver/David H. Steinberg (he wrote “American Pie 2”) script is rounding up a lot of stereotypes to incorporate in Stephanie — short hair included — and NOT have her turn out to be gay.
Woke!
They’re all a little concerned for Annie, and that leads to the funniest “Girls’ Rules” scene — a visit to a sex shop. Darned if there isn’t this super-enthusiastic, super-helpful lady there (Sara Rue) who shows them ALL the toys and declares, “I mean, it’s a BEAUTIFUL time to be alive, ladies!”
Turns out “Ellen” is their new principal. Turns out, she’s Annie’s new neighbor. Turns out, the “fresh meat” the girls all drool over in school is her son, Grant (Darren Barnet).
The girls have made “a pact” to have hot dates they can sex up for MORP. But unbeknownst to each other, they’ve all fixated on Grant as their ideal. Except for Annie, whose boyfriend is, you know, in college hundreds of miles away.
Who will end up with the “fresh meat,” and will they all find love in addition to lust for that one magic night?
The plot offers zero surprises, and a somewhat pointless collection of cameos (Danny Trejo, Barry Bostwick and Cl noint Howard) and random references to “band camp” and “The Breakfast Club” don’t atone for that.
Nor does the occasional jaw-droppingly crude and kind of funny line — “You were practically eating his face…What’d he TASTE like?” — or sight gag, such as lacrosse queen Steph conking Grant on the head from long range on a bet and demanding her marks “VENMO me, bi—-s!”
Broadway and Curda and Rue are the stand-out no-holds-barred comediennes here, and Pettis handles a sexy slapstick opening scene with deadpan skill.
As rude and raunchy teen sex comedies go, I’ve seen worse. But this Universal sequel on Netflix just shows how dated and stodgy studio entries in the genre seem, when compared to any number of Netflix “naughty teen “originals.”
If you’re going to compete with the streamer that keeps finding funny-dirty things to do with Joey King, you might want to hire some women behind the camera to help you catch up.
MPAA Rating: R (Alcohol and Some Drug Use|Strong/Crude Sexual Content|Language Throughout)
Cast: Madison Pettis, Lizze Broadway, Natasha Benham, Piper Curda, Darren Barnet and Sara Rue
Credits: Directed by Mike Elliott, script by Blayne Weaver, David H. Steinberg. A Universal/Netflix release.
Movie Nation 