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.
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.
“The Babysitter: Killer Queen” is a sequel to the teen death-cult comedy “The Babysitter,” which all the cool kids gathered round the TV to “Netflix” back in 2017.
The sequel, in which finding fresh slasher comedy laughs shows, first scene to last, isn’t anything to skip (home) school for.
And there’s just enough down time, –in between the frenetic butchery, manic off-color one-liners, teens behaving badly, teachers cursing students and parents taking bong hits while they play VR “Halo” — to ponder the imponderable.
McG? What HAPPENED to you, man?
Granted, in this “post-director” filmmaking environment, where you’re either a legend or just this week’s hack who talks a good game and works cheap (Russo Brothers, cough cough), just finding steady work is a challenge.
But McG, real name Joseph McGinty Nicol, directed “We Are Marshall.” He survived the Cameron/Lucy/Drew “Charlie’s Angels” franchise (barely). He even got to do a “Terminator” sequel.
And here he is, just a couple of years after getting that AARP card in the mail, producing and directed a little TV here and there and making disposable shlock-shock comedies for Netflix.
“Killer Queen” has our once-babysat fraidy-cat Cole (Judah Lewis) coping with high school bullies, parents (Leslie Bibb, Ken Marino) who never believed his babysitter was mistress of a Devil Book cult. The only “friend” who could verify the events of that awful, blood-stained night they survived two years ago is Mel (Emily Alyn Lind), the school hottie who refuses to ding her rep by confirming his worst nightmare was true.
As consolation, she invites him to a Teens Gone Wild houseboat party down on Lake Mead or Lake Powell (in the desert). And damned if the SAME murderous things go down, with many of the same villains. He and we are puzzled when Allison (Bella Thorne), Sonya (Hana Mae Lee) and John (Andrew Bachelor), among others, show up for more ritualistic “play.” Didn’t we see Allison’s head explode in a shotgun blast last time out?
“What can I say? The Devil gives good head!”
Maybe the new Goth girl, fresh from “juvie” and named “Phoebe” (Jenna Ortega) can help.
Every joke is a piece of low-hanging fruit, every gag sophomoric, every “zinger” a dated bit of teen-friendly innuendo.
Melanie? She’s “DTF,” her stoner-Dad (Chris Wylde) cracks. “Ditches (school) Thursday and Fridays.”
Some of the effects are OK, and the night shots around the lake show some sophistication.
But the script is utter crap, the performances pro forma and the “threat” even sillier, if bloodier, than it was last time around.
The romance and endless possibilities of a motorcycle create many an armchair adventurer. But if you’ve got the bike, the time and the yen for “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” why not think big?
“Long Way Up” is the third epic motorcycle trip/travelogue undertaken by avid cyclists and longtime actor friends Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman.
After “Long Way Round” (2004) took them around the world, across Europe, Siberia and North America, and “Long Way Down” (2007) saw them venture from Scotland to South Africa, they figured they’d never get around to one last super-long trip.
McGregor told me as much when I interviewed him as his film “Salmon Fishing in Yemen” came out, back in 2011.
But circumstances changed, McGregor’s family life blew-up thanks to a very public affair with a co-star, and his turn in “Fargo” — where he met said co-star — gave him the luxury of another months-long odyssey. So he and Boorman, fresh off a couple of hospital-stays due to bike accidents, took a pre-Pandemic ramble from Tierra del Fuego, on the bottom tip of South America, to Los Angeles, where McGregor now makes his home.
Such a trip killed Classic “Top Gear,” but Boorman and McGregor are such charmers you can’t imagine a Jeremy Clarkson-style international Argentine incident, complete with BBC coverup, this time round.
For their latest “Long Way,” the lads would be riding American metal — Harley-Davidson motorcycles, with Detroit-built custom trucks hauling the support team. The hook? The Harleys are electric prototypes, and the trucks are Rivian electric pick-ups.
This ride, with two 50ish dads, would be about the adventure, the scenery, meeting and sampling new cultures and new cuisines. As always. But it’d also be about the greener future. And part of the adventure would be the added degree of difficulty steering electric vehicles through corners of the world where they haven’t caught on and installed charging stations.
No wheelies and vigorous off-roading for the lads. Their 100-150 mile range bikes would turn them into hyper-milers.
In the dozen years since their African trek, tiny GoPro style cameras on helmets and tiny camera drones have become all the rage. The footage is a lot more varied, lots of aerial shots. And the quiet electric bikes mean they can chat at-will while riding.
They’re always ooohing and aaaahhhing over the scenery, the states of the roads, glaciers and penguins, llamas and deserts, rainforests and volcanoes of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Occasionally, the dire state of their battery range dominates the conversation.
Ewan even sings and plays the guitar he buys en route — “Oh we’re ridin’ on a bike that doesn’t take no gas…I got the border blues, the border blues.”
“Long Way Up” shows us their “steep learning curve,” coping with battery range issues in the bitter cold southern South American winter, figuring out recharging in places where their support companies — Harley and Rivian — didn’t get charging stations installed (and they installed quite a few along the way), charming closed out-of-season hotels and hostels into reopening, it’s basically a nostalgic revisiting of the earlier quests’ Greatest Hits.
A Ewan McGregor movie is showing in one pub they stop in. There’s even a Chilean family that takes them in and feeds Charlie and Ewan, who mistakenly thought their house was an electronics business. That’s the first place somebody “makes” Ewan.
“La Isla,” the man says (“The Island”), in Spanish to his family, recognizing the star. Good thing Ewan’s Spanish is pretty bad at that stage of the trip. Reminding an actor of an infamous bomb isn’t good form — in Scotland, anyway.
Mobbed in Machu Picchu, and Ecuador, McGregor reminds us he’s a good sport.
National parks, seaside drives, deserts crossed, a UNICEF children’s shelter in Nicaragua — they even find themselves using local guides to dodge gang activity and “keep a low profile” in in Guatemala and Mexico.
It’s just that “Everybody that wants a selfie lets the world know where we are,” McGregor shrugs.
Many episodes and incidents remind one of why it takes a good-sized support team to undertake “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” on the “Blue Highways” of the less-developed world. A backup generator truck when the local power supply fails, an advance team to hold a ferry here and there, they even buy buses to fix up and use as campers for “night-driving” in dangerous Guatemala and Mexico.
The “Dad joke” nature of the trip slyly sneaks in here and there. Suffering the aftereffects of spicy food, Ewan, running his bike until the juice is gone — repeatedly, at first — Charley horsing around, just a wee bit, even though he’s coming off two bad accidents and long recoveries. Their epic adventure on bikes is more sweetly nostalgic this time round.
McGregor is much more the center of this trek, with Boorman more in the background. But the changes in McGregor’s personal life aren’t addressed in the least, which considering the “family” focus of the first two, leaves that as an elephant in the room. This isn’t “that kind” of friendship. No buddy bonding on-camera confessionals, or even fake ones of the type Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon serve up in their “The Trip” movies.
The arrival of McGregor’s adopted Mongolian daughter for part of a journey seems like a desperate and obvious effort to address that gap without doing anything of the sort. For a while, at least, his other kids wanted nothing to do with him.
Still, it’s a lovely travelogue – 13 countries worth. Hyper-miling to do it with electric bikes adds bits of suspense and touches of drama.
For those of us who can do math, noting how few miles they’re able to pile up in the bitter winter cold of southern South America, 13,000 miles in 100 days does start to seem like a ride-too-far.
But that’s a reason to stick around to the end, isn’t it?
MPAA Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman.
Credits: Directed by David Alexanian and Russ Malkin. An Apple TV+ release (premiering Sept. 18)
I loved “The Long Way Round,” and “The Long Way Down,” two epic motorcycle road trips undertaken by actor pals Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman (son of the great director John “Deliverance” Boorman).
It’s been 13 years since the second trip, and now the lads have gone green and are riding from Tierra Del Fuego to LA on electric Harley Davidsons.
The pansies should go to Point Barrow, Alaska, but don’t tell them that.
I’m a bicycle not a motorcycle guy, but I can’t miss this Apple + TV (Sept 17) series (10 parts) because I’ve missed Ewan saying “Charlie Booooooooorman.”
McGregor and I talked about the series the last time I interviewed him, and he didn’t think they’d be nimble and unfettered enough to do another, due to their advancing years and obligations.
Who would have suspected that the perfect “whodunit” title would turn up on a Korean thriller?
“Killed My Wife (Anaereul Jukyessda)” is a guilty, sinking suspicion, a question and in the end an answer to a mystery, cryptically served-up in a solid genre thriller that keeps you guessing, thanks at least in part to a bit of cheating on the part of the filmmaker.
It opens with a death in a darkened apartment. Drops of blood hit the floor, followed by the bleeding woman it was coming from.
The cops get word, and in the morning they check in with the victim’s husband. Jeong-ho (Lee Si-eon) is living in another apartment, sleeping one off. He was so drunk last night he has no idea what he did or where. He’s pretty sure he didn’t kill his wife, though.
The veteran detective (Ahn Nae-sang) offers up “Usually the victim knows” the person who killed her, which gets Jeong-ho’s back up.
Then we see his shirt. It’s bloody. The cop sees it. Jeong-ho is the last to notice. He protests his innocence, and damned if a knife doesn’t fall out of his jacket. Before we know it, the cop has the cuffs out but Jeong-ho is quicker with the frying pan.
And he’s off, on a mad dash to sober-up, reconstruct the previous night and construct an iron clad alibi.
We can’t help but notice he doesn’t take even a moment to mourn. We can’t miss that the friend he was with, bar-hopping, knows an awful lot of his business — a job loss that Jeong-ho kept from his wife, money problems, a “loan shark.”
The cop, it turns out, was recently demoted. He’s too embarrassed to admit he got jumped “by a bum,” and when he comes across money at the crime scene, he grabs it.
What’s HIS story? Ten or so minutes in, and we’re piling up suspects. Poor Jeong-ho doesn’t know whether to feel guilty, how guilty to feel or where to go next as he reconstructs a night that ended with his wife dead on her apartment floor.
Gangs, teen punks, a friendly barmaid, a karaoke bar, CCTV footage and other wrinkles will work their way into our puzzle-solving as we, Jeong-ho and the cops try to reason out which of the myriad suspects had motive, access and no alibi on the night in question.
Lee Si-eon does a lovely job of suggesting guilt-ridden befuddlement, a man with a black-out drunk drinking problem that his wife was exhausted from coping with, and a man with debts which just might have gotten his wife killed.
Ahn Nae-sang ensures that Det. Choi is another mystery. Why was he demoted? How does he get away with slapping around younger cops, and is he really motivated to catch Jeong-ho, and if so, why?
Writer-director Kim Ha-ra doesn’t always play fair with the clues, but masterfully works in red herrings that make us suspect almost everybody introduced as a potential killer.
In addition to the “cheating” with the clues, “Killed My Wife” moves along in fits and starts, losing its urgency, making one wonder how long a suspect could walk the streets after Korean cops finger him and unleash the country’s vast CCTV network on hunting him down.
It’s still a solid and most engrossing entry in the whodunit genre, one Hollywood has been content to tread water in for years and years.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse
Cast: Lee Si-eon, Ahn Nae-sang, Seo Ji-young
Credits: Written and directed by Kim Ha-ra. A Blue Fox release.
“Antebellum” is a gorgeously-shot but dawdling and ditzy parable on race and “the patriarchy,” told in three acts.
First-time feature writer/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz make the most of their Big Chance, opening their film with an impressive-if-not-quite-dazzling five minute tracking shot, lighting and framing their recreations of the Civil War South with “Gone With the Wind” Technicolor care.
But as screenwriters, their First Best Destiny might be keeping a script doctor on speed dial. Their “mystery” isn’t nearly mysterious enough. And that three act structure makes for a grim, distressing and lumbering opening, a tense and bloody finale and a middle act — the one set in the modern day that “explains” what’s going on — that is as straight-up hackwork, a Tyler Perry fashion show meant to add dread but where rolling one’s eyes is the only proper response.
Janelle Monaé stars as Eden, a slave on a plantation in Civil War Lousiana or Mississippi, from the looks of it. We meet her in the aftermath of a failed escape attempt by some of her fellow hostages. She is tortured by “Him” (Eric Lange), the “general” in charge of this plantation, General Foghorn Leghorn, from the sounds of him.
“Ah often PONDER the DEPTHS of yo’loyalty,” he purrs, as he metes out torture that he calls “punishment.”
Somehow, “Eden” has to escape this, and we get hints of how she might affect that get-away, here and there.
But there’s something very strange about this plantation. It’s in the cotton fields, and what’s done with the crop. It’s in the way there’s a full company of Confederate soldiers, some with repeating rifles, stand guard. They like to march by torchlight.
“Blood and soil,” they chant, just like the Nazis in Charlottesville and your average Proud Boys/Trump rally.
Veronica (Monáe) awakens from this nightmare in her posh house, with her loving husband and adorable little girl. Her life as an author is modern and scheduled — from her speeches, book-signings and TV appearances debating right wing Congressmen to her personalized yoga instruction.
But there’s danger in that TV debate, and menace in the drawled interrogation of a video call from this odd David Duke blonde “journalist” (Jena Malone).
Never you mind. Veronica’s “advice to the lovelorn” author pal (Gabourey Sidibe) shows up, so let the fashion show, tsunami of circle-jerk compliments and slang and flashy-fleshy girls-night-out begin.
What we see here and hear in the best parts of “Antebellum” are horrific and as topical as the evergreen William Faulkner quote that opens the film.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Black lives then and Black lives now are perceived as a threat by some, a threat worthy of violence.
But this isn’t a horror movie, isn’t a work of speculative fiction and doesn’t have much “Get Out” in it, which is precisely the way it’s been sold since it was announced.
The middle act kills the “thrills” in “thriller.”
It’s lightly-preachy, and the sermon is on point. The violence is shocking and personal.
Monáe is fine as the lead, charismatic even when you feel the script is letting her down — arch dialogue, situations as obvious plot devices. Sidibe is playing a caricature of the “Byeeeee– good MORN-tink” Black girlfriend in a hundred other films, Kiersey Clemons is like most of the supporting cast — barely in it — and Malone is a drawling cartoon.
The screenplay’s artifice is too obvious. How you take it and take to it comes down to one image, the closest you’ll get to a “spoiler” in this review — a cell phone in a saddlebag.
Sometimes the ridiculous, over-the-top and overly articulate “gentility” of Deep South speech is there for a reason, and isn’t the product of some misguided Brit whose only experience of the dialect has been old Hollywood movies.
Sometimes, the parable gets lost in peripherals — making every shot perfect, making every female character a clothes horse.
And sometimes the hype isn’t appreciated because it’s been a bait and switch all along.
MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content, language, and sexual references
Cast: Janelle Monáe, Jena Malone, Gabourey Sidibe, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, Eric Lange and Tongayi Chirisa.
Credits: Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz. A Lionsgate release.
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