Yeah, he’s gotten rich gulling the gullible, baiting bigots and ridiculing the ridiculous. But he’s afraid of what might happen of we don’t chase them back under the rocks they crawled out from under
The Australian model and TV presenter turned actress Ruby Rose has transformed herself into as credible a two-fisted big screen badass as any willowy, featherweight model could ever hope to be.
TV’s “Batwoman” can handle fight choreography, with a little help from a creative cinematographer and editor. And she’s impressive in the brawls as “The Doorman,” her B-movie “Die Hard” knockoff that pits her against a New York apartment complex full of terrorists.
It’s a stick-to-the-formula thriller about a Marine embassy guard with a Big Failure in her past forced to fend off a bunch of armed thugs holding her late sister’s family hostage over Easter weekend in an apartment building undergoing renovations.
The chief villain is played by the French actor/gourmand Jean Reno, and he and his gang are out for something somebody hid in the walls of The Carrington long ago.
So we’ve got the wild card, the female “doorman” with “very particular skills,” as Liam Neeson always puts it, vs. the chatty, urbane Frenchman who is here to sniff at being offered “Italian” wine, “I prefer Bordeaux!”
Reno’s “Victor Dubois” purrs words of murderous comfort to his hostages, dad Jon (Rupert Evans) and his son and daughter.
“Remember, we are civilized.”
He discusses Goya, and has an eye for Caravaggio. And every so often, he gets on the walkie talkie with our heroine for a little trash talk. Because when “just a woman” has picked off one minion after another, she’s going to have their walkie talkies to make threats, and hear them.
“Zees EEeenternet ees a MARvelous invention, n’est–cepas?”
The script is a clumsy patchwork of gimmicks — history professor Jon playing mind-games with his captors — obvious bits of foreshadowing and Wikipedia-shallow discourses on Rachmaninoff and Goya, all designed to fill the minutes between Ruby Rose throw-downs.
Director Ryûhei Kitamura (“Midnight Meat Train”) and his team ensure that those fights are passable. The supporting performances are pro forma for the bad guys, cloying for the kids.
But Rose doesn’t suggest panic, fury or urgency in any moment where she’s not fighting. The character’s in-the-moment reactions are flat, dull. The intensity she brought to “John Wick” isn’t here. She slow-walks through the part, waiting for the odd action film one-liner.
It takes a real professional to commit to material that adds up to little and try to make it better by force of personality. Fight choreography aside, she doesn’t bring her A-game to this B-movie.
MPAA rating: R for violence throughout, language and brief teen drug use
Cast: Ruby Rose, Jean Reno, Rupert Evans, Louis Mandylor, Aksel Hennie
Credits: Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura, script by Lior Chefetz and Joe Swanson. A Lionsgate release.
A December Netflix and theatrical release. Fincher directing Tuppence and Seyfried and Charles Dance and Oldman.
Curious to see how this plays into the “He wrote nothing else half as good as ‘Citizen Kane’ and Orson Welles went on to be Orson Welles” argument, which was settled academically decades ago.
You know the old saying, “The road to Haiyan is paved with good intentions.”
Super typhoon Haiyan, one of the most violent cyclones ever to make landfall, tore up the Philippines in 2013. “When the Storm Fades” is a docu-dramedy about survivors picking themselves up to carry on, predatory international capitalists swooping in for beachside land development, and earnest aid workers trying to help but lucky if they don’t make a bigger mess out Tacloban City before they move on to the next catastrophe.
It’s about First World/Third World inequality, climate-changed superstorms, cultures clashing and virtue signalling volunteerism. So it’s tragic and infuriating and yeah, kind of funny, when you look at it.
A trio of older sisters dream of opening a sari sari store, a place to sell the spring rolls that they’re peddling to make ends meet, three years after the storm.
Teen siblings Lovely and Arnel Pablo are trying to a new start, with their father, recovering from the shock and taking training to better their chances to get out from under the grief and hardship hurled upon them that November three years before. Their dad Abner still seems in shock.
Everybody there lost someone, saw and smelled death for months and months. And as a local activist notes (in Filipino, with English subtitles), “When you have no livelihood, every day’s a disaster.”
And then there are the foreigners, aid workers, “experts” building this replacement sea wall “without consulting” anybody local, planting mangroves on a piece of eroded shoreline where an old man has already rebuilt his marsh stilt house. He chats with the aid worker supervising the planting, notes he’s planning to add on to his house, hears out the “you’ll need permission to cut these trees down,” and shrugs that off with the thought that by the time he has the money, the trees will be big enough “so I can use them for building materials.”
The EveryForeigner characters the film focuses on are a Canadian couple, Clare (Kayla Lorette) and Trevor (Aaron Read, hilarious). She seems earnest about this volunteer trip, “helping out.” Trevor is forever taking photos, ineptly “helping” with woodwork and learning all about mangroves, which he relates to every other foreigner he meets. The work is just something standing in the way of his next meal.
“You feeling lunch? Anyone feeling lunch?”
Sean Devlin’s film amplifies the cultural divide as visitors are quick to judge Filipino practices that First World folk call “barbaric,” hunting whale sharks, for instance. They’re eager to see helplessness and impose “solutions” on the locals, or prey on them when they need cash and have land to sell.
But accepting First World responsibility for climate change, and offering to pay for rebuilding? Not so much.
Making Trevor, and to a lesser degree Clare, as poster pasty-faced people for Virtue Signalling — Trevor’s “Look what we’re doing, aren’t we righteous?” social media posts — is funny, on its surface. At least Clare experiences growth, from a Canadian ditz who thinks a gift of lavender cuttings is what somebody living hand-to-mouth needs, to a person who recognizes the scale of the problem and the injustices that created it.
But it’s hard to see great harm in people offering to pitch in, spending money to get there and getting a first-person experience in another culture’s crisis, even the ones who brag about it on Facebook. And climate change may be imposed on poorer countries by the richer ones, but clearing mangroves and dynamite-fishing reefs are kind of a Filipino thing, magnifying their own calamities.
And let’s face it, there’s virtue signalling in the film itself. It was made — a closing credit says, abiding by The Jemez Principles, sort of a Hippocratic Oath for First World people and organizations trying to “help” those in crisis or simply “less fortunate.
Righteous intent and funny spin on volunteerism aside, “When the Storm Fades” is entirely too brief a film to wrestle with the many issues introduced in any depth.
Being a docu-drama, there’s a lot of compelling footage of real people just getting on with life. The “messages” come from the actors — showing what NOT to do or say, or getting into arguments that lay out, in plain language, the stakes and villains of such situations.
But even as Devlin points out the lack of easy, simple solutions and the foolhardiness of some “good” intentions, he makes the case that wanting to help is human, that lives and lifestyles have value, and invites us to root for those struggling, even if the best thing we could possibly do for them is write a check.
“The Wall of Mexico” is an arch allegory about immigration, about the “haves” building walls to limit access by the “have-nots.”
It’s clever enough, with its story of a prosperous, long-established Mexican-American family blocking local access to its treasured well crystal clear in its messaging to most anybody watching it. But then the filmmakers outsmart themselves with a clumsy, “the moral of our story” over-explained finale.
It’s OK. We get it. And “saying the same thing twice is not inherently a waste of breath,” the film’s one repeated quip, doesn’t let you off the hook for this blunder.
Jackson Rathbone of “The Twilight Saga” and TV’s “The Last Ship” is Donovan, a Floridian newly-transplanted to the American Southwest, and a new night-watchman/gardener/handyman for the Arista family, whose sprawling hacienda screams “old money” to the other folks in Winfield.
Patriarch Henry (Esai Morales) keeps a close eye on the family business, but not on his two daughters. Tania (Marisol Sacramento) and Ximena (Carmela Zumbado) are beautiful, educated, cultured and louche. They’re also childish hard-partiers who carry the confidence of their class in every mean-girl dismissal.
“Godless, arrogant, sick-minded brats who are a waste of water,” is how the older hired hand (Xander Berkely) sums them up.
“They’re nice to me” the new kid protests.
“For a minute.“
Don tries to pass for a local, or at least an Oklahoman, with his sh–kicker boots, hat and drawl. But the townsfolk wonder about him working for “the Mexicans.”
“Don’t drink the water,” they joke. Don figures that’s just some racist thing he doesn’t get, until Henry insists that he shed some of his other duties and “camp out by the well.” Locals are draining it. And that water? It’s special.
Don doesn’t mind, just so long as the mean girls keep inviting him to sample their lifestyle, their cocaine and their other appetites.
“So, what are we celebrating?”
“You shouldn’t think of champagne that way. That’s unfair to champagne!”
It can’t last. And that well? It’s going dry. Slow-on-the-uptake-Don wonders what the heck is going on here.
Co-directors Zachary Cotler (he also wrote the script) and Magdalena Zyzak ladle on the indolence and hedonism in scenes with “the girls,” who switch to Spanish whenever they want to mock Don’s naivete with their cokehead pal Corkscrew Juan (Moises Arias).
They’re all as witty as they are cruel, with Corkscrew an endless supply of jokes in Spanish insulting “gringo rednecks” and “Mexicans.”
“What’s the difference between Jesus Christ and a Mexican? Jesus doesn’t have a tattoo of a Mexican on his chest.”
It’s not about race, kids. It’s about class. Always.
The mystery about “the well” isn’t that mysterious, but what it symbolizes only becomes clear when Henry resolves to stop the “trespassers” from sneaking onto his property to steal from it. That’s what gives the film it’s title, “The Wall of Mexico.”
The attractive young people do what attractive young people do, right up to the point where class is threatened. The well that divides the community (Mariel Hemingway plays the mayor) becomes an interpersonal chasm, not just a social one.
And in case anybody misses what this is all about, the smarter sister makes a point of imperiously explaining it at the story’s coda, straining to prove that “saying the same thing twice is not inherently a waste of breath” but in cinema storytelling terms, failing.
MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Jackson Rathbone, Marisol Sacremento, Carmela Zumbado, Moises Arias, Alex Meneses, Xander Berkeley, Mariel Hemingway and Esai Morales.
Credits: Directed by Zachary Cotler, Magdalena Zyzak, script by Zachary Colter. A Dark Star release.
One of the best Nigerian films in recent years is a nerve-wracking thriller about human trafficking.
“Òlòtūré” takes its titular heroine (Sharon Ooja)from the grim brothels of Lagos to the terrifying deal many of the young women there make to realize “my dream, to go to Europe.”
But the street walkers and pimps don’t know Òlòtūré by that name. Donning a blonde wig and hooker-wear, she is Ehi, a “new girl” whom we meet as she irritates the veteran sex workers when customers choose her out of the line-up at the brothel.
When she slips out the bathroom window of the hotel/bar/brothel where a Jabba-sized client has chosen her, we wonder about her commitment. Her asking questions of the other women raises an eyebrow. Is she “too naive for this job (in Edo, Idoma or pidgin, with English subtitles)? Or is she a cop, as others suspect?
She’s particularly interested in the earnest, veteran prostitute Linda (Omowunmi Dada).
Òlòtūré, whose name means “endurance,” is a reporter — undercover for The Scoop. And her fretful editor (Blossom Chukwujekwu) figures she has “more bravery than sense,” sticking with this dangerous and degrading assignment, exposing the official corruption and the deadly bargain too many woman are making in a sprawling, populous country whose law enforcement is either overwhelmed or content to turn a blind eye.
Director Kenneth Gyang, working from a Craig Freimond/Yinka Ogun script, doesn’t spare us much here. This sordid trade, carried out in the open, is undergoing a change in the business model, as Ehi discovers. The fading pimp Chuks (Ikechukwu Onunaku) is not taking this shift to the Internet without taking out his frustrations on the women he is losing control of.
The threat of violence from pimps is being replaced by the unsavory brutes of the human trafficking trade, with the sneering, secretive Alero (Omoni Oboli) calling the shots.
The real violence ranging from beatings delivered to the sex workers, rape and murder. And as rough and scary as the prostitution is, when Òlòtūré enters the shady, higher-stakes people-smuggling pipeline, things take a turn toward horrific.
The acting can be uneven, but Ooja makes a compelling heroine and Onunaku a harrowing villain.
Gyang (“The Lost Cafe”) maintains suspense, even as the picture tends to slow down just as the stakes reach their highest.
Hand-held camera chases, emotionally fraught close-ups, arresting compositions and a script that gives a familiar story a distinctly African flavor make “Òlòtūré” a thriller you not only endure — it’s pretty rough — but marvel over and embrace.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity
“Yellow Rose,” which opens this weekend, has a timely theme — the immigrant’s struggle, a colorful setting — the Texas of country and Western music — and a scene stealing turn from Texas honky tonk legend Dale Watson.
My twangier friends were hip to Dale, the crooning, the white hair and sideburns. He was revelation to me.
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If you only see one gonzo fake-priest-trapped-in-a-real-exorcism thriller, make it “The Cleansing Hour.”
An account of a live-streamed exorcism, part of an online show titled “The Cleansing Hour,” it’s a violent and entertaining ride through demonic possession, religious fakery, the perils of Catholic education and the evil power of the Internet.
It takes shots at nuns as teachers, online “programming,” film students and Satan. And it figures that it was directed by a guy named Damien.
Father Max (Ryan Guzman of “The Boy Next Door” and TV’s “9-1-1”) and his old pal Drew (Kyle Gallner of “The Finest Hour”) cooked up this streaming show, an exorcism a week.
Hunky Father Max, in a shower of effects and sparks, gets into it with a demon possessing someone, demanding “Give me your NAME!” as (an actor) spews hate speech in the Regan-in-“The Exorcist” growl back at him.
And once he gets that name, Max spouts the demon-appropriate incantation. Boom! Demon gone, thanks and tears all around. Credits.
“May God bless you and the Devil miss you,” he says. “And don’t forget, follow your faithful servant in a fallen world @FatherMaxTCH.” And “check out our merch” on the website before you log-off.
But as Drew badgers Max to “expand” the brand — “Again, priests don’t do seances. How many times I gotta tell you?” — and Max trades on his hunky fame for bar pick-ups, someone or someTHING is taking note.
A guest star is waylaid en route to the studio, Drew’s Max-hating makeup artist/actress girlfriend Lane (Alix Angelis) is pressed into duty, strapped down on the restraining table where Max confronts the possessed.
And tonight, our faithless “self-taught” lapsed Catholic “priest” will be tested by the real deal, his producer and production crew menaced, torched, stabbed etc. The “truth” will out.
The effects guy (Daniel Hoffmann-Gill) can only shrug when the “effects,” like Lane, go “off script” and the Satanic demon starts in on Max and everybody else in the “studio.”
“You f— with the bull, you’ll eventually get the horns!”
Flashbacks show what Max and Drew endured in Catholic school, explaining why they wanted to get their revenge via this show, and Drew’s ongoing research into their subject. Can he Google he the right prayer/incantation to save them?
“Max, you can’t just read random Bible verses! It won’t work!”
The effects here are largely analog — not digital — and suitably impressive.
The acting is committed and intense, with the odd moment of wit — “I’ll never be high at work again, I swear!” — lightening the mood.
There’s a little “Truman Show” homage in letting us see the audience — on TV, tablets or phones, around the world — and how this scary “real” terror is making them kiss their crucifixes or thank their lucky stars that they’re a long way from America.
Sure, it’s just another exorcism movie, this time with an overfamiliar Internet live-streaming hook. But I was entertained and you might be, too.
Director/co-writer Damien LeVeck? Take a boy, if that’s your real name.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity, sexual situations
Cast: Ryan Guzman, Kyle Gallner, Alix Angelis and Emma Holzer
Credits: Directed by Damien LeVeck, script by Damien LeVeck and Aaron Howitz. A Shudder release.
It begins with the voice of a police dispatcher, something about “hunting” and “beheaded” and our “suspect is in a red vehicle,” and “check for pizza signs.”
Our first glimpse of that suspect (David Harper) has him leering and lurching in a red shirt and cap, a pizza delivery guy with a bag full of bloody heads.
Sound promising? Then let’s dish about “Chop Chop,” a slasher film with a meat cleaver edge.
That promising, tense opening gives way to a seriously slow-footed, quasi-incoherent “relationshippy” slasher-thriller-on-the-run.
Because our murderous pizza guy — whose only line is pretty much “I have…abilities” — sort of supernaturals his way into an apartment with Liv (Atala Arce) and Chuck (Jake Taylor). And things don’t go as their frustrating “date” or pizza guy’s murderous “abilities” lead us to believe.
The feature debut of writer-director Rony Patel shoots our anti-heroes in a lot of static close-ups as he puts them in a succession of perilous situations.
He fritters away much of the suspense in these “undramatic-pause” heavy scenes, and repeatedly stages the resolution to a captive situation or torture scenario — this violent narrow escape or that one — off camera.
Why? Beats me.
This “chopper stumbles into choppers” set up is promising, but any hint of “Sweeney Todd” is implied, nothing more.
The performances are either blase’ or over-the-top, nothing in between.
Breaking sequences into chapters titled “Package” and “Brother” and what-not does nothing for clarity. Having the last villain these two face (Mikael Mattsson) turn into a talker doesn’t help.
“I can’t wait to slice you up into string cheese.”
Talking and pausing, beheadings or slicings aside, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of “Chop Chop.” And I can’t say the filmmaker gave me any reason to try.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic bloody violence
Cast: Atala Arce, Jake Taylor, David Harper, Mikael Mattsson and Jeremy Jordan.
Credits: Written and directed by Rony Patel. A Fairwolf release.
Movie Nation 