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.
You’ve got a choice for kid-friendly film entertainment this weekend.
You can stream Adam Sandler’s most sentimental “family” movie ever — complete with poop and peepee jokes, and Sandler’s sad ensemble of faded comics — “Hubie Halloween.”
Or you can find a cineplex or drive-in that’s showing Oscar winners Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, along with Uma Thurman, Jane Seymour and Cheech Marin, and a bunch of kids giving their all to “The War with Grandpa.”
“Grandpa” is even more sentimental, just as childishly slapshticky, has no edge at all, and no toilet jokes. But thanks to that cast, it’s marginally better. Any chance to catch this crew on the screen is worth treasuring, even in a middling comedy that’s been shelved several times since it was filmed three years ago.
De Niro’s a widowed, retired home builder whose inability to handle everything from driving to self-checkout at the supermarket has his daughter (Thurman) move him into her house.
Husband Arthur (Rob Riggle) and their teen and elementary school daughters have to adjust.
Sixth grader Peter (Oakes Fegley)? He has to give up his room and move into the leaky, bat and rat infested attic. And he’s irked. Egged on by his pals at school (where they’re bullied), Peter declares “war.” Even writes Grandpa a declaration announcing his intentions.
Grandpa is depressed and lonely, and his only grandson wants to start something.
“You really want a war? Because I’ve been in one. Even if you win, everybody gets hurt.”
Let the ever-escalating pranks and practical jokes begin — sabotaging Grandpa’s shaving cream, disrupting a funeral he attends, setting him up to take this or that pratfall.
Did you know medical alert devices are an open invitation to “SWAT” a senior you’ve got a beef with?
Peter needs to learn the phrase “Hey, he might break a HIP.”
Grandpa tries to maintain the peace, but he’s got a pal (Walken) egging him on, just like Peter.
“This aggression…will not…STAND. Semper fi!”
The pranks fly back the other way — humiliating homework rewrites, taking the screws out of every chair and bed in Peter’s room.
“Dude, I think your grandpa might be a ninja!”
They agreed to two rules — “No collateral damage” and “No telling.” But as Mom and Dad start bearing the brunt of stunts gone awry, they have to know something’s up.
The gags are limp, even the elaborate ones. But there’s a chuckle in the best of the dust-ups, a trampoline dodgeball battle that has Peter and pals facing off with Grandpa, and buddies played by Walken and Cheech Marin, and a roped-in cashier (Jane Seymour).
“Hope you brought your Polygrip, Old Man!”
De Niro never breaks character, never makes this another “Dirty Grandpa,” and twinkles every time he stops to lecture the kid on the evils of “war.” But he can be provoked.
“He’s old. His fingers don’t work!”
“I got ONE finger that works!”
And Walken? He’s reached the stage in his working life where every word out of his mouth is funny. The screenwriters must be fans, because he gets the best lines, even dressed up as Santa.
“What’s YOUR…name? Lemme guess, it…wasn’t a NAME twenty years ago.”
“The War with Grandpa” can feel old fashioned. It’s too mild-mannered for our Pg-13-and-up era. But little kids — VERY little kids — will chuckle at the pranks.
Just remember to have the “don’t try this at home” talk afterwards.
MPAA Rating: PG
Cast: Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Oakes Fegley, Christopher Walken, Cheech Marin, Rob Riggle and Jane Seymour
Credits: Directed by Tim Hill, script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, based on the novel by Robert Kimmel Smith. A 101 Studios release.
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.
Movie Nation 