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Malin Akerman and Kat Dennings and Wanda Sykes and Jane Seymour and Aisha Tyler. There’re some guys in it, too. But I hit the highlights. “Friendsgiving” is out before Halloween. Not that they’re rushing things.
A good romantic comedy is like a happy love affair. Even when our couple faces obstacles, they should feel “easy” to overcome, even if they aren’t. Even if every relationship requires work, we shouldn’t see the effort.
“Gossip Girl” veteran Natalie Krinsky’s “The Broken Hearts Gallery” is not without its charms — likable leads, amusing sidekicks (mostly), built around a cute conceit.
But the 110 minute running time is a dead giveaway that what should flow by breezily and happen without a strain are labored. Scenes that should play in shorthand are repeated, beaten to death to get across a point, and even the “cute” can feel forced.
That conceit? Lovelorn Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) keeps mementos from every failed relationship she’s ever had. And not just concert ticket stubs and photos, but a rubber ducky here, a retainer there. A bike tire? Espresso machine?
Her cluttered apartment is, her BFFs Amanda (Molly Gordon, funny) and Nadine (“Hamilton’s” Phillipa Soo, funnier) lament, “a cove of sorrows.” She is “a hoarder,” she is told, and not for the ony time. She needs to “Marie Kondo” her life, toss out that which does not “bring joy.”
“We do not SPEAK her name in this house!”
When Lucy gets dumped and loses her job in a posh New York art gallery on the same night early on in the film, we’re treated to the film’s “meet cute.” She drunkenly hops into a random Prius, which isn’t an Uber. And the nice-enough guy (Dacre Montgomery) driving it takes pity on her and takes her home.
Their banter is a lot of glib instant psychoanalysis — Lucy the “hoarder” vs. Nick the “minimalist.”
He’s cynical — “Everyone either leaves, disappoints or dies.”
She’s sentimental — “When love crumbles, how do you preserve its ruins?”
Turns out Nick is opening a boutique hotel, doing the work converting an old YMCA himself. Turns out he has no plans for the balcony over the entry lobby. In a flash, she’s inspired to place her “collection” of “no value” in it, a “broken hearts gallery,” with every item curated and linked to an ex-lover.
And others, they quickly discover, have such mementos too — and sad or bitter or bittersweet stories to go with them. She’ll be “the CFO, chief feelings officer” of the Hotel Chloe.
The hotel isn’t finished and hasn’t even opened, and already it has buzz, Lucy has purpose and Nick just sort of rolls in her wake.
Krinsky writes glorious banter, a must in any rom-com. It’s a blend of cutesy and coarse, with riffs on mourning by “masturbating and braiding your hair for three weeks” and someone who’s as “tight as a Mormon teenager.”
A lot of the quips comes from the BFFs, bitchy lawyer-to-be-Amanda who sports a silent, earbuds-always-in six year boyfriend, and lesbian Lothario (Lothari-a?) Nadine.
There are so many asides and semi-novel touches — Lucy’s “secret” that we sort of see coming, Nick’s which we don’t — not one but TWO cloying karaoke moments, that Krinsky’s script has a hint of “a season’s worth of a sitcom” ideas about it. A little winnowing was in order, even if this or that random bit “brings joy.”
For instance, Nick has to “save” Lucy from creating a scene with an ex and she barks at him for “manhandling” her on a New York public street. New York being New York, a pushy stranger intervenes, assuming assault has occurred.
“Being a woman is like being in a God—–d ‘Nobody BELIEVES Me’ movie!”
Moments and amusing rants aside, the leads are rather pleasantly bland and don’t set off much in the way of sparks or heat. Kind of “The CW” that way. Nick is pointlessly given a best friend with little funny to contribute. Even the villain, the guy who last-dumped-Lucy (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is just pretty and pretty boring.
The casting is a landmark in representation, although few characters make much more than a passing impression. Bernadette Peters is the gallery-owning idol Lucy looks up to.
“I’m not one of these bitches who doesn’t empower women!”
And the very hook that all of this hangs on, the “gallery” of mementos, is far more interesting in its acquisition (videoed testimonials from the donors) than in curation. Kind of a non-starter as an idea, more of a website than an installation.
Yes, there are too many “random” “good talk” attempts to shove fresh (ish) slang into every crack and crevice. And yes, the “Gallery” is entirely too cluttered, literally and in a make-work-project-for-a-lot-of-bland actors way. Charm is forced to fill in for charisma and players that pop.
But even if it plays like a sitcom pilot that might get picked up after a little recasting, “Broken Hearts Gallery” is never unpleasant and only rarely a drag. In rom-com starved Hollywood, call that a “win” and call it a day.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content throughout and some crude references, strong language and drug references
Cast: Geraldine Viswanathan, Dacre Montgomery, Molly Gordon, Phillipa Soo and Bernadette Peters.
Credits: Written and directed by Natalie Krinsky. A Sony Tristar release.
A tram on Jersulem’s Red Line makes its way from east to west, through an important city of many religions and cultures, revealing itself through the passengers who get on at various stops at many different times of day.
But does “A Tramway in Jerusalem” really manage that? And forget the idea that Amos Gitai’s spotty anthology film is a travelogue or “Visit the Holy Land” tourist advert. The myopia of seeing the city, glimpsed here and there, via a clean, modern and safe train is never less than sterile.
The occasional hints of friction, embittered Palestinians either grousing “the Jewish state” or rapping “Your bullets don’t scare us,” don’t really tell “the story” or even “a story.”
A lonely Catholic priest (Pippo Delbono) drones on incantations and homilies with a touch of madness about them. And the fact that he’s going on in Italian about adultery and Jesus saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” sitting next to a woman (Yuval Scharf) who’s just guiltily dished to a friend about the affair she’s having with a married sugar daddy would be funnier if we thought she understood Italian.
It can’t have been the intention of veteran director and co-writer Amos Gitai (“Kedma,” “Berlin-Jerusalem”) to serve up a collection of “types,” but at least they’re not broad enough to label “stereotypes.” Usually.
Sure, a yenta (Hana Laslo) nags her 30something son about getting married and giving her grandchildren, joking with and engaging a Yeshiva student and anybody else there in her case. A reporter tries to interview the new European football coach who’s just taken over Beitar Jerusalem and cannot get a word in edgewise as his boorish, cheerleading Israeli assistant breathlessly interrupts and answers for him, the train’s creeper of a security guard (Liron Levo) harasses attractive women, and at the behest of a Jewish Israeli “Karen,” profiles and assaults a Palestinian man who has had the temerity to stand next to her with a bouquet of store-bought flowers.
Golly, get my travel agent on the phone.
It’s a movie of music — a singer’s untranslated aria opens our vignettes, an Orthodox man serenades a traincar with his jumbush (Cümbüş), a mandolin/banjo hybrid common in the region, a Yeshiva class sings, and later a Palestinian rapper raps.
But the monologues and dialogues are supposed to carry it. The famous French actor Mathieu Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Quantum of Solace”) is the most accessible “See this ride/this city through his eyes” character, a tourist with his tween son (Elias Amalric), absorbing the jumbush playing singer’s song, half-recoiling from two very pushy locals who get smilingly defensive about anything sound like a criticism of “The Jewish State.”
He reads (in French) from a long letter, written in 1850, by the French writer Flaubert, relating his experiences traveling in The Holy Land long ago. Sometimes flattering, sometimes profane, Flaubert’s descriptions, the father illustrates to his son, still resonate.
“Jerusalem feels like a fortified mass grave.”
You find yourself wishing, as a non-Israeli watching this, that Gitai had built the movie around these two rather than limiting them to two scenes. The stranger-in-a-strange-land getting this world explained to him is an old trope, but it works.
Quarreling couples and parting lovers (he’s a soldier going on duty for a stretch), the “Tramway” sees all, but reveals little. I found this anthology-as-collection-of-types indulgent and annoying, not a complete waste of time but an infuriating one.
Zombie movies are challenging Kia and K-Pop as Korea’s major export, these days. “Train to Busan” and “Peninsula” were big budget theatrical entries, and “#Alive” arrives as the Netflix version, lower stakes, smaller scale, more intimate by design.
It doesn’t have the thrills of “Busan,” and its moments of pathos never quite achieve lump-in-the-throat status. But it’s a sturdy enough study in isolation in survival mode and the despair that comes with it.
COVID19 timely? You bet.
Jun-u (Ah-in Yoo) is a 20ish slacker who wakes up to an empty apartment and a note from his mother. He needs to hit the market as they’re low on food.
OK, maybe after a few hours playing his online combat game. Damned if one of his teammates doesn’t doesn’t blurt out “Turn on your TV” as another asks, “Is that CGI?”
The zombie outbreak begins, “aggressive” people attacking the uninfected, mass hysteria which he can see from the balcony of his high-rise apartment. His first encounter with a stranger amid all this mayhem doesn’t go well. The guy’s been bitten. We see him jerk, bleed from the eyes, and spasm into full out “BRAINS” attack, thanks to some clever editing.
A final voice mail from his family tells him to “Just do what they say on TV” and “Just make sure have enough food and water to survive for 60 days.”
Plainly, they expected him to shop rather than go first-person-online-shooter.
Snippets of the pandemic come in via TV, as long as it lasts — and social media, as long as that’s up. Selfies still shots, begging for help, or doing something stupid. Jun-u vlogs into the void, forgetfully suggesting “Don’t forget to subscribe (in Korean, with English subtitles)” after every entry.
There’s little to eat, too much risk outside his door. And maybe a short-attention-span/instant-gratification gamer isn’t the best-equipped bloke to manage this. All it takes is a single TV ad for ramen to have him devour “The last meal,” an instant ramen bucket meant to help him make it through two months.
He despairs at the the horrors he’s seen on the streets below, resolves to “never go out” and as the days pass, loses hope.
And then he’s “contacted” by a stranger in the apartment tower across the way. Kim Yu-Bin (Park Shin-hye) is just as alone, but more mature, resourceful and better-prepared for this. Or so it seems. But how can they team up?
This isn’t a particularly ambitious zombie film, but the scriptural problem-solving makes good use of the sorts of toys/gear young people might have on hand, at home.
The leads make their characters just quirky enough to hold our interest. We root for them as a couple, quarantining a hundred yards or so apart. There’s survivalism in every zombie film, but the “relationship” stuff reminds me of the German film “Rammbock” from ten years ago.
There truly is nothing new under the sun of the Living Dead, so don’t come to “#Alive” expecting to be dazzled, just favorable impressed. And don’t expect to be surprised. Even the third act “twist” has turned up in other zombie fare — films and/or TV.
This is a zombie film as comfort food, predictable but just satisfying enough to come off.
There have been a lot of documentaries about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s America, and more will show up between now and election day 2020.
But the only one on that subject that strikes me as “essential viewing” is “Red, White & Wasted,” an eye-opening peek into the psyche, intellect, folkways and values of “the Trump base” we hear so much about these days.
Filmmakers Sam Jones and Andrei Bowden Schwartz access this world via the “mudding” community of Central Florida. They dive into a subculture of Confederate flag-flying rednecks who like nothing better than throwing a cooler into the aged pick-em-up truck they’ve spent their time and dimes modifying, and tearing up some bit of swampland, drinking, littering and whooping it up with their tribe as they do.
With every glimpse into these lives, every hedonistic excess — twirking, stripping bikini clad mudder molls — every disagreement settled with fists, every drunken “accident” that no one, save for anyone with a lick of common sense “could’a seen coming,” we come to understand the “live like you’ll die young” mindset.
With every racial slur, every suck on a beer, drag on a bong and gap-toothed Trump endorsement, we grasp the helplessness of lives of the white, low income, “low information” and low tolerance for anybody not them. We grit our teeth and wonder how many millions of votes it’s going to take to chase them back under the rocks they crawled out from under.
Our tour guide here is a grand old man of mudding, Matthew Burns, who used to be known as “Video Pat” back when there was lots of undeveloped/unmonitored land for this weekend pastime. Before cell phones, Pat would camcorder your Sunday mishaps and trucking triumphs ruining Florida watershed by tearing up wetlands.
Burns is, by the standards of a lot of the angry, intolerant and/or morbidly-obese men we hear from in the film, a decent enough sort. He’s a scrapper/scavenger, scraping out a living dumpster-diving for scrap metal, with two daughters, a junk-filled yard and manufactured home to match.
“Mud is like a drug to me,” he waxes. “But it’s not worth going to jail for.”
Pat rather cluelessly laments the diminishing access he and his kind have to public lands and undeveloped private property that they’ve trespassed on for decades. He bitches about what’s being “destroyed” by developers, without seeing the destruction and desecration mudders bring to their weekend brews-and-big-trucks bacchanals.
Then we meet his daughters and hear our first racial slurs. And the n-word happy young women symbolically open the floodgates — “foreigners” are favorite whipping boys of the good’ol boys and gals of Greater or Lesser Orlando.
“I like Russia, though,” one dead-end-at-25 cretin bellows. “I have a lot of respect for Vladimir Putin.”
The Budweiser flows and the belligerence grows. “The Confed’rate flag,” one tipsy pre-diabetic “country boy” expounds, “ain’t about SAL-very (sic),” in between hiccups.
We see gun tattoos and bumper stickers and hear screeching, shirtless tirades about “second ‘mendment” before we see the first firearm. For the godless and amoral, guns are their religion.
The filmmakers use some of Pat’s old videos and a stunning amount of access and embedding to get racist “redneck stereotype” confessions and reckless offroad moments that explain every “offroading fatality” we hear on the news.
This isn’t “Vernon, Florida,” Errol Morris’s classic dissection of small-town cracker Florida. But what Jones and Schwartz give us here is jaw-dropping in ways that make you think, “Oh, THAT explains EVERYthing” about America today.
We appreciate Pat’s plight, that “makin’ a living off other people’s garbage ain’t easy,” but see the distressing environment he’s raised his kids in, despair at seeing one of them pregnant, and shake our heads at how hellbent Pat is on “getting (the baby) in the mud” with them.
Their “don’t give a f—” ethos is in every utterance, their delusions are deep and wide. Self-reliant, handy with tools but blind to the poverty programs that they so deride but which have to be paying for an epileptic daughter’s medicine and the pregnant daughter’s childbirth, venomous about “foreigners” until Mario, a neighbor, helps fix a lawnmower and proves “Spanish people can be all right.”
One telling crack from one of the assorted testimonials reveals how much as a group they like doing things that “piss a lot of people (especially ‘libruls’) off.”
We think, for a moment, that maybe Pat — with a new grandkid, a life plan that hasn’t worked out, kids that are staggering into the same pothole he did — will have a “Come to Jesus” moment, visiting the vast Red Neck Yacht Club mudder park at Punta Gorda, and seeing the chaos that putting thousands of people just like him in one place creates.
Maybe the development of the ironically-named “Swamp Ghost” land, mudder trespassing property right off Orlando’s tourist-trap International Drive, will wake him up.
Why is the swamp there a “ghost,” Patty-boy? Because you all helped kill it.
But nah, self-reflection isn’t big with this crowd. He’ll be dreaming of his old trucks and looking for a back-way into a state wetlands sanctuary in no time. Maybe before the closing credits.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity, racial slurs
Cast: Matthew “Pat” Burns, Kristi Burns, Jessi Burns
Credits: Directed by Sam Jones, Andrei Bowden Schwartz. A Dark Star release.
“Immortal” is an interesting Screenwriting 201 assignment that somehow made it onto the screen.
How would your thriller/horror/end-of-life drama screenplay turn out differently if a character or characters could not be killed?
“The Villain Who Won’t Die” is an old horror movie convention. But what about the victim? What about a dying character in a couple that’s lived it up, knowing their borrowed time, planning a duel suicide to “pass over” together?
It’s as uneven as anthology films invariably are, with the range here being “almost comes off” to “indifferent.” The stories, all by Jon Dabach, are cleverly titled after their characters — “Gary and Vanessa,” “Ted and Mary,” etc.
A few “names” were lured to turn a quartet of short scripts on this theme into “Immortal” — Mario Van Peebles, horror icon Tony Todd, veteran character actor Dylan Baker, Agnes Bruckner (TV’s “The Returned”), Samm Levine.
Baker plays a fully engaged English teacher who lectures on “Lord of the Flies” but whose favorite fiction has to be “The Most Dangerous Game.”
Todd and Robin Bartlett star in the tender story, related by them to a video production crew, of the last day of one of their lives, which will climax (they figure) with an assisted suicide.
“If I knew this was coming, I’d have eaten more hot dogs!”
Van Peebles plays a cable repair guy in “Gary and Vanessa,” about a husband (Brett Edwards) who decides the only way to provide for his pregnant wife (Bruckner) and future child is to fake his death.
Levine (TV’s “Wet Hot American Summer”) is a hit-and-run victim who has a seriously uninteresting idea for how to turn his can’t-die experience into revenge.
A few of the players — Baker, Todd, Lindsay Mushett (as a student opposite Baker) — give fair value.
But none of the tales told makes for riveting watching, with slack storytelling, indifferent acting mixed in with a solid performance here and there. And there are these head-snappingly dumb boners in the script that become the film’s sole stand-out features.
There’s a high school filled with what look like 30 year-olds as students.
A guy who stages his death as an accident in which he’s electrocuted by a Dish/Direct TV cable and falls off the roof is a guy who doesn’t know there’s no electricity running from the dish. It’s coax cable with harmless video being fed through it. That reminds you that a lot of younger screenwriters don’t know which end of a screwdriver to use.
And I don’t care if Tony “Candyland” Todd is a screen legend. If he says “That sense of normalacy” on your set, you stop rolling, correct the grammar (there’s no such word) and get another take. Or maybe run spellcheck on your script if you wrote it that way.
Yes, the Achilles Heel of “Immortal” is the script, which plays as if it started life as a film school writing exercise, and probably never should have left the classroom.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence
Cast: Tony Todd, Agnes Bruckner, Lindsay Mushett, Dylan Baker, Mario Van Peebles and Samm Levine
Credits: Directed by Tom Colley, Danny Isaacs, Rob Margolies, and Jon Dabach, script by Jon Dabach. A Stonecutter Media release.
“Villain” is a straight-up gangster picture in the modern British mold, Cockney hoodlums slinging slang, talking tough and when the need arises, breaking out the hammer and breaking heads.
Genre veteran Craig Fairbrass (“Get Lucky,” “The Hooligan Factory”) rumbles through a familiar underworld like a permanently balled-up fist, taking care of business in all the usual ways in a seriously unsurprising story of the ex-con-gets-out-and-gets-sucked-right-back-in formula.
Eddy has done his ten years, respected by other inmates, liked well enough by the guard who tells him “We’ll keep ya’bed warm for’ya” as he makes his exit.
Waiting for him at the gate is brother Shaun (George Ross, who co-wrote the script) and Eddy’s ’80s vintage Mercedes. Eddy rolls with the living arrangements — stuck at Shaun’s place with his mouthy, plainly drugged-up stripper girlfriend (Eloise Lovell Anderson). A visit to The Green Man pub, which the brothers co-own, financed by the sorts of “jobs” that put Eddy in prison, shows that Shaun’s let the place go to pot, letting the staff drink up his profits. And the raccoon eyes and constant sniffling tip our mug that his brother is taking what’s left “and stickin’ it up ya’nose.”
At least the car runs.
Eddy never saw the film’s opening scene, where two brutes were walking Shaun through a murdered-and-left-in-a-field threat. Things are bad, and just like that, Shaun has too grab his hammer and set to cleaning them up.
Sooner or later, the brutal Garrett brothers (Robert Glenister, Tommy May) will have to be placated. Somehow, Eddy’s got to keep clear of the law and stay legit if he wants to get back in the life of his estranged daughter (Izuka Hoyle).
None of this is out-of-the-ordinary in gangland films. The trouble is, we’re marched through it as if genre-demands are dictating every action and are the sole “motivation.”
Fairbrass spends twenty minutes showing us Eddy’s stoicism and forbearance, and then — BOOM, out comes the old ultraviolence. He’s doesn’t sell the characters rising fury.
The violence itself is brutal enough, shocking in the usual ways. Fairbrass, Glenister and May never let us forget what they’re capable of just by their presence.
A saving grace of any movie in this milieu is the Cockney slang, “getting out of the nick (prison), a visit from ‘old bill’ (cops),” a police informant is “a grass,” a shakedown is “the old Billy Boy turnout.”
It’s not enough to save “Villain,” but it and Fairbrass’s hulking presence make this over-familiar gangland lullaby worth a sit-thru, if not worth one’s undivided attention.
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual material
Cast: Craig Fairbrass, Izuka Hoyle, George Russo, Robert Glenister ,Tommy May.
Credits: Directed by Philip Barantini, script by Greg Hall and George Russo. A Saban Films release.
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