We do love our sports here in the West. It’s always been so.
Here’s a WWII story about Brits willing to ignore the fact that the “keeper” who can save them from “relegation” is “a NAZI!”
And you wonder where Alabama, Clemson and Florida State get that myopia from.
“The Keeper” is in goal Oct. 2.
Whatever gifts French writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré brings to the table, “subtlety” isn’t included. Her challenging, provocative hot-button Tween Girls Gone (somewhat) Wild drama “Cuties” (“Mignonnes” in French) slaps you in the face–hard — and not just once but repeatedly.
It barrels through a Senegalese girl’s transition from Muslim immigrant in a patriarchy to twerking, stripper-in-a-rap-video sexually-“woke” in a breakneck fashion.
Doucouré (“Maman(s)” is her best-known credit) grabs “growing up too fast in the West” and rides that message with a vengeance, eschewing smooth, natural transitions in favor of shocks to the system.
It’s as jarring as it is unsettling, crosses lines she doesn’t need her to cross to make her points, and abandons religious hot buttons she seems too timid to wholly engage.
When we meet her, Amy (Fathia Youssouf) is a wide-eyed innocent. She’s 11, dutifully looking after two younger brothers, one in diapers. She is on the cusp of womanhood within her emigre community, listening in on the Muslim women’s ministries’ entreaties to “obey your husbands,” and “fear Allah.”
But her mother (Maïmouna Gueye), keeping the family together by herself, has gotten troubling news. Her husband has found a second wife, and is bringing her back to France to marry and move into their apartment. Mother Mariam had no say, and doesn’t have to articulate the betrayal this feels like.
After all, they left Senegal for Western Europe. Is polygamy even allowed there?
Amy has just absorbed this news when she spies a classmate shaking her groove thing and ironing her long hair in the apartment complex’s laundry room. Amy is transfixed. She watches, admires and envies. She would love to be in with Angelica’s (Médina El Aidi-Azouni) crowd.
They’re a brash, brusque and tightnit quartet that wants to compete in the big dance-off coming up. Amy is entirely too square, too unskilled, too socially awkward and plainly-dressed to crack in with blonde bully Jessica (Ilanah Cami-Goursolas), pushy Coumba (Esther Gohourou) Angelica and Yasmine (Myriam Hamma).
Besides, they’re already a quartet. Sure, she can video them rehearsing. But “I can learn” to dance won’t mean a thing if they don’t alter their lineup.
At home, Amy starts acting out. Her mother understands why she won’t talk to her father on the phone, but is totally unaware she’s stolen an uncle’s phone and her mom’s money, and has utterly immersed herself in the hyper-sexualized Western culture that the Cuties represent. Adults are totally out of the loop with this crowd.
Amy neglects her babysitting duties, hides her new, makeup-and-coochie-cutters/halter top look and makes it her business to imitate her more “mature” peers in every way — flirting with boys, imitating the vulgar displays of underclad music video dancers, and backing up her sisters in her new gang.
Doucouré jerks Amy, and us, through every stage of this transition. One scene, she’s still the demure but curious immigrant. The next she’s Nicki Minaj and Sherri Moon Zombie, a bumping, grinding, pouty-mouthed sex object, totally tarted-up if not quite aware of exactly what it is she’s impersonating.
Youssouf plays Amy as an open-book wonder, eager to “fit in” — numb or just stunningly naive when it comes to recognizing how out of line her behavior is in the culture she’s been raised in.
At several points in the film’s third act her “We-need-to-act-older-than-11” peers recoil, and say “You’ve gone too far” to our heroine. It’s not out of line to think our director has committed the same sin. If a guy had filmed this (As if!), he’d have to hide out in the Polanski Pedophile Precincts of Switzerland.
But it’s not really messaging or Doucouré hitting her points too hard that took me out of “Cuties.” It’s the many abrupt transitions, the too-sudden conversion Amy undergoes, the avoidance of showing stark repercussions within her Islamic community and the unbelievable way Amy comes to understand what she has become and its personal, sexual and moral consequences.
The kid is 11, we keep reminding ourselves. Doucouré seems to occasionally forget.
Doucouré brings a much-needed new perspective and new voice to the cinema. But this doesn’t have the depth or grim impact of a “Kids” (1995) or “thirteen” (2003). And signing on with Netflix, where “M.I.L.F.” and “An Easy Girl” are just the French entries in the streaming service’s race to find a young-younger-youngest sexual “edge,” is no way to pick up one thing her storytelling desperately lacks.
Subtlety.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexually suggestive content, slap-fight violence, profanity
Cast: Fathia Youssouf, Médina El Aidi-Azouni, Esther Gohourou, Ilanah Cami-Goursolas, Myriam Hamma and Maïmouna Gueye
Credits: Written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:36
Zut alors! Could it be, that this earlier version of an Agatha Christie novel is now on assorted streaming TV channels? Taking advantage of the fact that this story will return to theaters under the care of Sir Kenneth Branagh anon?
If I was a gambling man, I’d put money on the fact that this 1978 Christie adaptation, the second starring the great Peter Ustinov, was the one that inspired Branagh and the studio then-known as 20th century Fox to revive Hercule Poirot and this old-fashioned whodunit franchise.
“Murder on the Orient Express” is the most famous Dame Agatha title, at least as far as the big screen goes. It’s a good story to stuff with an all-star cast and introduce Christie’s obnoxious, all-seeing/all-knowing sleuth and gourmand, a “proof of concept” franchise opener.
That was good enough for Ustinov and director Sidney Lumet and Paramount back in 1974, and good enough for Branagh and Fox in 2017. But the film that really sells the character, the series and the way these movies should be approached is the timelessly campy “Death on the Nile.” All these decades later, and it holds up. It’s still gloriously campy fun.
Lumet was one of the great directors his era, with “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Prince of the City” among his career highlights. But “Nile” director John Guillermin? He did “The Towering Inferno” and “King Kong” and “Skyjacked” (also “Bridge at Remagen”). Here was a man who could fill the screen with stars, give each her or his moments, and make the trains run on time.
And damned if he didn’t have a lot more giggles with Poirot & Co. than Lumet did. That’s what having Anthony Shaffer (“Sleuth,” “The Wicker Man” and Hitchcock’s “Frenzy”) as your screenwriter will do for you.
The dull opening credits — over a shot of river water — don’t hint at the acrid, hammy fun to come.
Let’s start with casting — Ustinov as Poirot (he played him many times on the big screen and on TV), David Niven as Col. Race, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, her “Great Gatsby” co-star Lois Chiles (onetime Bond girl), a somewhat miscast George Kennedy (not awful), a seemingly more miscast Jack Warden, playing a German-Swiss doctor (he grows on you), and Olivia Hussey and Simon McCorkindale.
And none of them, not a one, has nearly as much fun as Angela Lansbury, cutting loose as a lush and best-selling romance novelist, Salome Otterbourne, floridly and drunkenly prattling on about “the calumnies of life!”
Her arrival, some 20 minutes in, is when the stodgy whodunit takes off and her co-stars let their inner ham run free. Pairing up Bette Davis, as a maybe-not-super-rich old lady, with Maggie Smith as her butch assistant and back-talking masseuse? Inspired.
“How would a little trip down the Nile suit you?
“There are two things in the world I can’t abide — It’s heat and heathens.”
Ustinov wraps his tongue around many a plummy turn of phrase. To the embittered, ditched Jacqueline (Farrow), who lost her man (McCorkindale) to her richer and prettier best friend (Chiles) — “Do not allow evil into your ‘eart. Eet weeel make a home there.”
“If love can’t live there, evil will do just as well!”
There’s all this old-fashioned national prejudice on display (the setting is the mid’30s), cracks about fetching “that Hun doctor” and the like. Poirot is the butt of many of these insults, a reminder that the Brits invented most of the world’s racial, national and ethnic slurs.
“You perfectly foul French upstart!”
“Belgian upstart, please, madame.”
“You damn froggy (French) eavesdropper!” “Belgian! Belgian eavesdropper!”
The costumes are period perfect, the setting — on a river steamer heading up the Nile, past pyramids and the like — gorgeous.
And the whodunit mystery still plays, over 40 years later. As a genre, I find those to age particularly poorly. Not here.
“Death on the Nile” is freely-adopted from the Christie novel, and I dare say Sir Ken & Crew will tinker with the story and alter it further.
For my money, the bar was low in remaking “Murder on the Orient Express” — so many versions, so few that hold up. The real test of this as a franchise, and any hopes 20th Century Studios has that new owner Disney will open the purse strings for new films, will be how much fun they wring out of “a little trip down the Nile.”
Right now, the new “Death” is slated for Oct. 23. I can hardly wait.
MPAA Rating: PG, violence and blood
Cast: Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, Lois Chiles, Mia Farrow, George Kennedy, Jack Warden, Simon McCorkindale, Jon Finch and Maggie Smith.
Credits: Directed by John Guillermin, script by Anthony Shaffer. A Paramount release, now on Pluto, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 2:20
Well, we’re looking at baseball, NBA, college football and possibly even pro football seasons that will wear an asterisk.
Why not the movie box office? The pandemic is keeping theaters closed — even open ones are operating at vastly reduced capacity — so it’s not really fair to compare “Tenet” now (a seriously fudged $20 million opening, Warners claimed last week) to what “Tenet” might have been.
On the other hand, it’d be a great indicator of whether people are feeling safer about going out and buying tickets. Nope. No numbers for “Tenet,” which is being allowed onto drive-ins (Warners, to their shame, refused to let it open on those) now that it got its head handed to it last weekend.
Sony has said it is joining in, hiding figures on a movie that wasn’t going to pack them in, even in the best of times. “The Broken Hearts Gallery” has a no-name/little-known cast, a thin romance built on a cute conceit. Mixed reviews. I didn’t warm to it.
No more. Warners isn’t announcing full, figures, now. They say that the film did $6.7 million, far below their announced $20 million last weekend. WB claims a 29% drop, which means it only earned $9-10 million US last weekend.
Why brag about it selling $2 million (tops) worth of tickets? As it turns out, they decided to report a $1.1 million opening.
“Unhinged,” on the other hand, is leaning into this box office wasteland. It’s playing at EVERY drive-in, and it is almost over $14 million after being the film that “reopened” theaters last month. Picking up a couple of million or so every week.
“New Mutants” bombed, as expected. “Mulan,” pulled from theatrical release in North America, has managed $37 million in theaters overseas, and is doing OK (Disney claims) on Disney+.
Totally understandable that others would conceal how badly their films are performing at the cinemas. The business model is shifting to streaming, no sense rubbing theater chains’ noses in it.
Oh look, somebody got Jim Gaffigan to narrate their student film.
Wait, isn’t it?
“I’ve Got Issues” is an attempt at “absurdist comedy,” bouncing through scores upon scores of VERY short vignettes, some so brief (a minute or less) that their title — “The Hurt,” “The Wooing of Susan,” “The Slippery Slope Job Interview” — is on the screen seemingly as long as the sketch.
That’s what writer-director Steve Collins serves up here, black-out sketches, perhaps aimed at making a point, most assuredly failing in that aim dozens of times.
A generally unknown and unpolished cast deadpans through “The Healer” (a “fraud” guru, played by Paul Gordon — I think), “Why Has it Got to Be Like This?” “Mr. Pizza” and “Please Help Mr. Pizza” and “Please Help Griselda.”
A sample sketch — “The Wooing of Owlnor” — has a Medieval performer explain and explain the tale he’s going to tell to a sparse senior center audience, announcing he’s telling it in Middle English, and promptly clearing the room.
And…SCENE.
Being unknowns, with scanty identification of character names and inadequate credits, one is left grappling with the hope that “Maybe bearded guy is in the next one (he’s almost funny)” or “Why did Collins try to create an Imitation Craig Robinson (“The Office”) etc.?”
That is Randy E. Aguebor’s lot here. Playing a keyboard, singing a song onto a cassette, sticking it in his mailbox, addressed to “Hollywood,” hoping for a break.
God knows the viewer is.
Gaffigan opens and closes with a morose, inane (scripted) lament, a shrugging “Humans...they struggle.”
As indeed Collins does. As will you. Honestly, I’m not sure Collins stays on topic (seven deadly sins, human foibles, things we “struggle” with emotionally) more than half the time.
NONE of these vignettes are funny. None. Cryptic and revealing? Nope.
I’m giving this one star for the decent indie cinema production values, and out of pity for the actors.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Macon Blair, Claire Titelman, Paul Gordon, Jim Merriman, Maria Thayer, Byron Brown, narrated by Jim Gaffigan
Credits: Written and directed by Steve Collins. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:28
What do you do…
Once you’ve tattooed that last square inch of available, never-exposed-to-sunlight skin?
Once you’ve run through every hair dye variation know to humanity, and moved on to hats?
Once your sartorial sense has transitioned from “unique” and “edgy” to standard-issue uniform of the tribe, a “get-up” that gives your whole game away in a glance?
Once you’re on your 36th band and 55th band name?
Well, you either take stock and “grow up,” or you grab your bass or Strat and Fender Twin and hike down to the venue where a whole lot of 30somethings just like you gather, and thrash it out, banter-it-up, drink and put off Big Decisions because “Tomorrow is another day.”
With brutal wreck-the-relationship editing, Mike Cuenca’s “I’ll Be Around” could have been something on the order of Richard Linklater’s career and generation-defining “Slacker,” or at least “Slacker” meets “The Decline of Western Civilization” and set in “Portlandia.”
It’s a chatty, over-populated comedy that sprints out of the gate and gets gassed about an hour in. Its tragedy is that Cuenca chose to drag out this shambolic slice-of-the-scruffy-life out for another hour after that.
In urban Petropolis (LA), all the post-punk punks have left 30 behind, but are still waiting on tables, still spending their waiting-on-tables cash on studio time (Who DOES that anymore? A running gag in the movie.), still competing to be heard at the venue of choice, The Mirror.
Performers and bands with names like Avenson, Jentacular, Six Seconds in Dallas, The Motion Pictures, Contre nous and Attempted Choke! vie for spots on this sure-to-be-sparsely-attended “festival” that’s tonight. Before then, they rehearse, try to get out of work early, wrestle over relationships, bicker-bargain with a recording engineer, do drugs, couple, uncouple, make-out with randoms and banter. A lot.
They fight about music, no “cookie-cutter bands” allowed, “none of this romanticized, suicidal nonsense.”
“I’m Mario and you’re Luigi — always second best!”
What’s that?
It’s an AUTOharp? You ain’t never heard of the CARTER Family? You ain’t never heard JIMMY CARTER play before?”
“Can we not sleep with people in other bands? It’s so incestuous!”
“I’m gonna form my OWN band, just to prove, just to prove...”
You’re the star and chain-smoking lead singer (Sarah Lawrence)? Maybe should cut down, try vaping, a manager suggests.
“Did you know that musicians who vape are twice as likely to fire their manager?”
The first act of “I’ll Be Around” is a tsunami of sass, with many many funny lines, even the corny ones.
But there’s very little “establishing” in this “establish who the characters are” portion of the picture. We know Eve (Lawrence) is old enough to question everything about her tiny taste of “stardom” and cynical enough to warn others away from this “career.” We can see Phoebe (Sofia Grace) has burned through her young, beautiful and impulsive 20s, and now feels the need to settle down in her ’30s. “But not with some ‘normie.’ And no musicians…Not some sado-killer who’s a pushover in bed.”
Other musicians, a studio owner/engineer, a barking 60ish concert promoter and a veritable sea of randos clip by, making little to no impression as they do — a “dweeb” in glasses here, a cock-of-the-walk “star” with an over-waxed mustache there.
The obnoxious drunk singer from Jentacular abuses one and all for “stealing our song” or having no talent.
And at about that one-hour mark, the picture quiets down (even as the show is starting) and the screenwriters try their hand at meet-ups, dates, arguments and fights of more substance.
They don’t get there. And as there’s precious little of the music to tie this all together, a giddy romp becomes an LA punk scene Death March.
Edited down to a “Slacker” length series of funny first impressions, encounters and zippy lines, “I’ll Be Around” wouldn’t outstay its welcome. Which it does.
Cast: Sofia Grace, Sarah Lawrence, Brendan Takash, Kat Yeary, Joey Halter, Dew Clapp
Credits: Directed by Mike Cuenca, script by Mike Cuenca and Dan Rojay. An Indie Rights release.
Running time: 2:03
So, have you been to the movies lately?
Theaters opened in your neck of the woods?
I am checking in on relatives in NC, where cinemas are closed. But I’ve seen three films since Florida’s were almost certainly prematurely reopened by the right wing goon, cover-up COVID numbers at large and in schools, Governor Wuhan Ron DeSantis.
Wore my mask throughout the films, socially distanced in theaters set up for that. Virtually the only person at the cinema at any of the films I went to see.
I check with studio publicists to see what might be previewed in cinemas, and no studio or its PR arm is acting as if going to the movies is anything like a “safe” activity in the failed state among failing states.
Waiting for a vaccine to magically “bring everything back to normal?” No, the waiting won’t end if and when that happens. Dr. Anthony Fauci says it may be a year AFTER the vaccine before the socially-distanced/mask-wearing movie going can be safely abandoned.
Meanwhile, in China, where the virus originated and which warned the world (late, probably) and took draconian measures to shut social transmission of it down, “Mulan” has opened — tepidly. A $25 million weekend is better than nothing, better than anything is likely to manage in the US for a long while. But it’s a lot closer to “normal” that the US, where we’ve “normalized” a thousand extra deaths a day for much of this year, thanks to the cascade of crimes, corruption and crises created by #WuhanDon and his “all the best people.”
Fernando Ferro is a trauma doctor, so naturally he keeps a very busy schedule.
He works shifts at two hospitals, one in Mar del Plata, the other in Buenos Aires. That means he has to keep apartments in each place, as they’re some 264 miles apart.
And two phones? And two cars, which he exchanges at a midpoint, each trip north or south? The clothes he changes into as he does?
Fernando (Adrián Suar) also has two wives, two families. Why? Because with them, “I feel complete.”
“Paula,” an EMT nurse (Gabriela Toscano) living in Buenos Aires with their two teen daughters, “means everything to me.”
“Vera,” a surgeon (Soledad Villamil) living in Mar del Plata with their eight year old son, “means everything to me.”
Right now, I’m checking my notes to see if I have the right wife living in the right city. Imagine how much Fernando, “Fer,” has to keep straight to keep this charade up?
That’s the point for much of “So Much Love to Give,” an Argentine comedy co-written by co-star Suar. It’s a bigamy farce largely seen from his point of view, which is its primary failing.
Because this scenario doesn’t become interesting until he slips up, until the wives figure out each others’ existence, convince each other that they’re both victims, and plot their revenge.
Alas, that revenge is the secondary failing of this enervated comedy. The plot to trip Fernando up, trap him and exact vengeance is tepid, too.
Nothing is made of the little clues “Fer” can’t help but leave along the way — ending a call “besitos” (little kisses) with one wife just as the other walks up on him in the supermarket.
“Who was that?” (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “Gonzalo” (a colleague).
“Since when do you blow kisses at Gonzalo?”
He’s pulled this off by them being blind to all his “conferences” (anniversary vacations) in Cozumel, his need to keep the extra job “out of loyalty,” and by his never ever telling a soul that any of this is going on.
One character’s sister guesses the truth in a flash. Fellow doctor Gonzalo (Alan Sabbagh) pieces it together after an accident.
“Polygamy is much more widespread than you think,” is Fernando’s deadpan defense.
Suar, star of the more memorable “Me casé con un boludo (I Married a Dumbass)” comes off as charmless, Villamil as fiery and vengeful and Toscano as broken-hearted, with no character allowed much more than that.
The middle acts, discovering the infidelity, work better than the self-rationalizing and logistics-packed opening, or the tepid “revenge” of the finale.
“So Much Love to Give,” titled “Corazon Loco (Crazy Love)” in its original Spanish, needs a lot more laughs to give to be worth recommending.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Soledad Villamil, Adrián Suar, Gabriela Toscano
Credits: Directed by Marcos Carnevale, script by Adrián Suar, Marcos Carnevale. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:48
Azura Skye’s broken, powerhouse performance animates “The Swerve,” a brittle psychological thriller about a woman on the edge.
As Holly, a teacher, wife and mother breaking under the strains of holding an extended family, a home and her classroom together, dismissed, badgered and berated by all around her, the veteran character actress makes a Melissa Leo in “Frozen River”/Viola Davis in “Doubt” “star is born” statement.
First-time feature director Dean Kapsalis keeps his camera tight on Skye’s haunted face, letting her hollowed-out eyes show the impact of every body blow, every humiliation, every moment Holly is taken for granted.
Her husband (Bryce Pinkham) is too wrapped up in “getting that promotion” at the supermarket to get what’s going on. Her two foul-mouthed kids think nothing of interrupting her every conversation, leaning on her for every tiny detail of their school day routine, blaming her for every thing that doesn’t tick over like clockwork.
And her high school English classes test her constantly, and ignore her mostly.
Let’s not mention her needy/judgemental mother (Deborah Hedwall) and beat-you-down-so-I-don’t-feel-small sister Claudia (Ashley Bell).
It’s no wonder she constantly stops at the bathroom medicine cabinet for her daily dose. Wouldn’t you?
When she asks drunken husband Rob, in the middle of love-making, “Is it always going to be like this?” there is no answer that won’t bring silent tears.
It isn’t just one thing that breaks her. It’s the mouse she sees in the house that Rob doesn’t concern himself with. It’s the cruel way Claudia, in a family dinner that plays like an intervention — for Claudia — lashes out, laughing, at some long ago blemish on Holly’s family reputation. It’s the stoned, hooting and hollering redneck goons who threaten her on a back road on the drive home from that “party.”
That’s where “The Swerve” gets its title. Holly’s medicated journey makes her wonder if that really happened, if anything of this stuff (the mouse “was staring at me” or “attacked me”) is a big a deal as she is treating it.
The story, just a hellish week in Holly’s hellish-for-years life, and Skye’s unerring portrayal take us on her downward spiral — the lashing out that takes many forms, the self-loathing that drives her psychosis.
Kapsalis has written and directed an engrossing “woman on the verge” tale. But it is Azura Skye who draws us into it, earns our sympathy and makes us fear for how far this woman will be pushed before she pushes back, or snaps altogether.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, sex, profanity
Cast: Azura Skye, Bryce Pinkham, Ashley Bell
Credits: Written and directed by Dean Kapsalis. An Epic release.
Running time: 1:35
Warner’s has found yet another “Wonder Woman 1984” release date. Now it’s a Christmas movie. Will it stick? “Tenet’s” numbers scared them to death, I dare say. Via Variety. https://t.co/8Nn9WwfrQA https://t.co/4SP5yFSngA https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1304461967902433280?s=20
Movie Nation 