Blanca loves her BMX bike. Mom might arrange a ride share to get her to school, but to Blanca, that’s just to transport her backpack.
She’ll race Señor Uber to school, taking shortcuts, doing jumps and dodging traffic as she does.
And heaven forbid she spies bullying on the school bus she races in that home stretch. Skinny-mini or not, tweenage Blanca (Natalia Coronado) is down to throw-down.
If Mom, a widowed film producer (Silvia Navarro) only knew. She despises and fears bicycles. But she’s a bit frazzled — problem solving, coping with divas on the set, mainly her director (Luis Ernesto Franco).
Mom can never know, but Blanca wants to enter the Big BMX race at the end of the month. Pal Laura (Victoria Viera) figures she’s a cinch to win. Even the boys want tips from her.
“You’re not cut out for it,” she sniffs. But how can she sign up for this dangerous race without parental consent? Wait, Mom’s a producer. Let’s hold a “casting call,” find a guy willing to pose as her dad. It turns out, that drive-share grey fox (Juan Pablo Medina) used to be a movie star. If only his agent (Roberto Quijano) can convince him to “audition.”
From that summary, you’ve guessed exactly where this thing is going. But “Dad Wanted,” aka “Se busca papá” lurches from bizarre twists to rank sentiment so often that maybe you don’t.
“The Big Race” is the finale, sure. But street mime and magic? Driver/actor Beto’s “secret grief?” And that “What’s a non-relative 40something hanging around with a 12-year-old?” “ick” factor’s got to be addressed.
Coronado is an adorably fresh-faced starlet who sulks well, big and small screen veteran Medina suggests the air of a man who “used to be somebody,” but who doesn’t want to “act any more.”
Among the cast-to-be-funnier-and-more-frenetic co-stars, Viera stands out — worldly enough to conjure up a voice synthesizer so she and Blanca can fool auditioners into thinking they’re adults casting a movie, quick to dissolve into tears if an adult raises her or his voice to her.
That audition sequence is far-fetched, but adorable and inventive (hiding the girls via bright lights and a screen, masking their voices).
Little else in “Dad Wanted” stands out. The “wacky” agent isn’t, stern ball-buster Mom may be a Mexican Michelle Monaghan, but has too few fuming moments to play. The sentimental stuff that takes over the third act beggars belief.
It’s harmless enough. Still, the only reason to watch it is if you and/or the kids need to brush up on your Spanish.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Natalia Coronado, Juan Pablo Medina, Silvia Navarro, Victoria Viera, Roberto Quijano, Luis Ernesto Franco
Credits: Directed by Javier Colinas, script by Victor Avelar, Paulette Hernandez, Fernando Barreda Luna and Javier Colinas. A Netflix release.
This comes our way Oct. 2. Apparently, Scots super host Craig Ferguson set the house afire doing a co-hosting gig a few years back with Kathie Lee Gifford, and she made sure this movie came of it. Wee bit daft, love the old Triumph “motorcar” they put them in.
Yes, I shamed Vertical into releasing the bloody trailer.
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Movie Preview: Kathie Lee Gifford, Elizabeth Hurley and Craig Ferguson — in Scotland — “Then Came You”
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.
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 SimonMcCorkindale.
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.
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.
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on BOX OFFICE: “Unhinged” is doing fine, Warners and Sony hide figures for “Tenet” and “Broken Hearts Gallery”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Movie Nation 