Dammit. Had no idea he was sick. Apparently only his family did. He was diagnosed four years ago, and only told his family. He rushed through a string of Marvel movies, made “21 Bridges” and worked with Spike Lee on “Da Five Bloods,” all in those last four years. Like late life Olivier, he piled on the work in a race against time, doing it between surgeries and treatments, his spokesperson said.
He will be remembered for “Black Panther,” a blockbuster that became a cultural phenomenon. But he was wonderful — much better — in “Marshall,” “42”and “Get on Up.”
Way too young to die, an actor of noble bearing just coming into his own. Rest in peace.
“Good Kisser” must be the most inane, dull lesbian seduction soap opera ever.
It’s about a menage a trois evening that goes the way such evenings go — at least in the movies. SOMEbody feels left out. Somebody’s feelings are hurt. Somebody told us everything we needed to know about about herself by even suggesting it.
It’s as cloying as “I can’t pay attention to two woman at once!” and as sexy as “Can I take your socks off?”
We meet assertive bartender Kate (Rachel Paulson of “Kleptos”) and mousy aspiring novelist Jenna (Kari Alison Hodge of “G.B.F.”) as they hop in a ride share on their way to…
“A date with another woman!”
British-accented Mia (Julia Eringer of “Girls Like Magic”) is their “date,” a confident seductress who widens the rift between the other two. As in Jenna chatters on, inanely sometimes, out of insecurity. And Kate? She cuts off the chatter and works in little digs every chance she gets out of her own insecurity.
“This isn’t an interrogation!”
The night is all wine and hot weather, popsicles and chick lit, affections shifting here and there, “good kissing” and nothing remotely romantic going on, threesome or twosome-wise.
Soap opera lighting, soap acting, soapy scenario, soap bubbly dialogue. A good looking cast and set pretty much wasted.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, drinking, smoking, profanity
Cast: Kari Alison Hodge, Julia Eringer, Rachel Paulson, Carter Rodriguez, Courtney McCullough
Credits: Written and directed by Wendy Jo Carlton. A Wolfe release, on Netflix.
The simplest of scenarios — a married couple wake up, trapped in a car covered in snow in the middle of nowhere, Norway.
The givens? No, the car won’t start. No, there’s no cell service. One person will take the “I think we should stay right here” and “I need you to trust me,” tack. Guess which one?
“Centigrade” is a survival thriller at its most basic, a minimalist tale that gets as much suspense and pathos as that limited and limiting plot allows. It’s a well-acted, well-crafted and utterly claustrophobic tale “inspired by a true story.”
Naomi (Genesis Rodriguez of “Delirium”) and Matt (Vincent Piazza of “Boardwalk Empire”) wake up, having pulled over in a blizzard on their way to a remote hotel that’s part of her book tour.
The windows are iced up. She can’t get the door open, and his words of comfort aren’t comforting at all.
“I just need a few minutes, and I will get us out of here,” he says. How many of us would have a clue about what to do?
We aren’t hit over the head with possible solutions, but we can see the rental car is a hatchback and a sun roof. It won’t start. Nobody tries the horn.
There’s a “survival kit” on board. Nothing of much use there.
She gets testy, and then has to pee. Nobody thinks to try warm urine on a frozen door lock. Hey, worth a shot.
Director and cowriter Brendan Walsh, a “Nurse Jackie” veteran making his feature film directing debut, trots out familiar story beats, hewing to formula. The passing snowplow that would never see them, the few seconds on a cell that are wasted in gulping fear and tears, the recriminations, the “People have secrets” argument.
And of course there’s “How she doing?”
“Keeps on kicking.” SOMEbody is pregnant, on top of “the sh–storm we’re in.”
Rodriguez manages to get across the idea of somebody who has let her needs come first. When scribbling a story, or a letter to whoever finds their corpses, is a priority, you know you’re dealing with a writer. Piazza plays the “Look where YOUR ‘planning’ has put us” card, the martyred and out-of-his-depth spouse, well.
The fictionalized “true story” parameters are another way the film is an exercise in making a movie within a straightjacket. As awful as this predicament is, “Centigrade” never comes close to becoming a horror movie.
But if you like claustrophobic stories of survival, putting yourself in the winter shoes of our antagonists, it’s not bad.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Genesis Rodriguez, Vincent Piazza
Credits: Directed by Brendan Walsh, script by Daley Nixon, Brendan Walsh. An IFC Midnight release.
There’s no denying the utter delight in seeing Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves back in the guises that made them famous, time-traveling slacker-rockers Bill and Ted.
Winter’s broad, goofy grin, Reeves’ trademark befuddlement — you don’t realize you’ve missed them until you see them again, older, still-in-character, still clinging to the Wyld Stallions dream.
Maybe thirty-one years later they have one more “excellent adventure” in them. Maybe we all do. Maybe not.
Sure, they say “twenty-five years” in the movie. But who doesn’t lie about his age, right?
Decades of pleading fanboy film journalist questions later, they finally made a third movie, a sentimental and cheerful affair that doesn’t amount to much more than an attempt to tap into their residual good vibes. And the glee that they sell their little air guitar moments with in “Bill & Ted Face the Music” makes you root for them, even as the jokes are strained, the moments of wit thin and the pacing not nearly as manic as a zippy zig-zag through time — by themselves and those closest to them — ought to be.
The original screenwriters return, and comedy veteran Dean Parisot (“Red 2,” “Galaxy Quest”) steps behind the camera. The guy knows comic action nostalgia. Or should.
But this too-little, almost-too-late sequel never grabs hold of giddy and never amounts to much at all, just a belated attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle.
Our two dudes are old marrieds now. But their constant togetherness — even taking couples therapy as two pairs– have driven their Medieval wives (Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays, replacing the “Bogus Journey” Medieval wives) to distraction.
They’ve raised two music-addicted slacker daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine).
And the Wyld Stallions are still doggedly making music, trying to come up with that one song “that will bring the world together.” But introducing “That Which Binds Us Through Time…the first three movements” isn’t likely to convert anybody to Tibetan chant mixed with a Therimin, bagpipes, etc.
While it may not matter to Rufus (the late George Carlin), his widow (Holland Taylor) now has The Great Leader gig. And she sends her daughter (Kristen Schaal) to fetch the dudes, chew them out and give them 77 minutes to get the song done before space and time tangle up end.
“Whoa.”
Events conspire to send Bill & Ted hurtling through time, via that time traveling phone booth, visiting their later selves, trying to find that point in the future when “we’ve already WRITTEN” the song.
Their daughters talk time-traveling Kelly (Schaal) out of her traveling egg and set out to build their dads the perfect backup band — Jimi Hendrix, caught mid-rehearsal, Louis Armstrong before he became a superstar.
“So what you’re all saying is that you love a song that I write in MY future,” Louis (Jeremiah Craft, good) ponders…
“Which is in YOUR past,” adds Jimi (DazMann Still)…
“But we’re in THIS present (1782 Vienna, recruiting Mozart).”
This “getting the band together” bit is rushed through — ancient Africa for a drummer, ancient China to grab famous composer-flutist Ling Lun, seen as a woman here (Sharon Gee). But too little of the film has that pacing.
The actresses playing the daughters are cute and take their shot at getting that Bill & Ted offspring quirk about them. It must skip a generation. The script isn’t a great help to them, but neither young lady is the least bit funny.
So you reach for the simple pleasures, the way our dudes’ eyes light up when taking up the air guitar again, their return to Hell to visit the droll German-accented Death (William Sadler), whose career as a solo bassist never took off and thus isn’t happy to see them.
“TALK to der hand!”
The many incarnations of Bill & Ted that the lads visit earn just a grin here and there — Bill & Ted in prison, comically muscle-bound, balding in a nursing home, etc.
Actor-musician Kid Cudi turns up as himself, the “Doc Brown” of this version of the tale, explaining the science and time travel paradoxes they’re up against as they scramble to “save everyone.”
It can’t have been easy engineering a story that would bring them back, please the stars, “play as young” as the originals and come off as fresh and funny. The “Bill & Ted” films are more beloved than hilarious, charmingly shambolicl. It’s always been about the characters.
One line from the script should have been an edict to the screenwriters, a line Bill and Ted repeat to each other with each time trip to try and fix the present via the future.
“Make it better, not worse!”
Alas, as sweet as some of this is, they rarely do.
Cast: Keanu Reeves Alex Winter, Kristen Schaal, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Jayma Mays, Erinn Hayes, Kid Cudi, Holland Taylor and William Sadler
Credits: Directed by Dean Parisot, script by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. An Orion/MGM release.
You gawk. You gape. You wonder what the Hell Hulu was thinking.
But hey, if Netflix and Amazon are going to push the envelope in “teens behaving badly” comedies, go big or go home, right?
Thus, “The Binge,” a sipping and gulping, smoking and snorting comedy riff on “The Purge.” Nobody imbibes, consumes, pops, smokes or pops any more. Except for one day a year. Hilarious idea.
And here’s Vince Vaughn, resurrecting the manic, profane patter that put him on the map before he aged out of “hipster” and came out of the closet as a Trumpster.
Is that really Morgan Freeman providing voice-over narration, “Binge” history about “a despondent” America, “self-medicating” to the point where a near Prohibition was enacted? Probably
Skyler Gisondo (“Booksmart,” “Feast of the Seven Fishes”) and Dexter Darden (“The Maze Runner” movies) play two BFFs who will indulge in their first Binge since each turned 18.
Maybe Griffin (Gisondo) will “drink enough to make a move” on the lovely, pals-since-childhood Lena (Grace Van Dien of “Lady Driver”). That’s Hags’ (Darden) biggest, bestest hope. Because Brown U.-bound Griffin is entirely too shy to ever have the guts to shy his true feelings otherwise.
Maybe a little alcohol — a LOT of alcohol — will give him the edge over the anonymous fellow who left a “prom date” invitation in Lena’s locker.
If only they can escape their parents’ annual root beer “Goats” and games party. If only they can get wrist bands into the hot party of the night, “The Gauntlet” drinking game championships at the Carnegie Library.
Odd detail, that one.
If ONLY Lena can pull one over on her dad, the “Don’t Binge” obsessed city councilman and principal if American High School.
“Go FLAMING Eagles!”
That would be the role Vince Vaughn (“Wedding Crashers”) plays, rah rah principal.
“Animaniacs” veteran Jordan VinDina wrote the script, which toys with the myths that high school kids invent about drugs and booze before they’ve ever had a taste of them. Exaggerate that into a future when nobody drinks and kids have even less access than now, when cheerleaders relate tales from “Sex and the City” as ancient history, and you get a lot of “I’ve heard…you know so-and-so says…My older cousin binged and” bad information.
“I heard that if you eat mushrooms and sacrifice an animal, your whole world turns into a musical!”
That theory will be put to the test over a night-long quest for the boys — with long-abandoned friend Andrew (Eduardo Franco of “Booksmart”) in tow — to reach that “Gauntlet” party, where Lena hangs out waiting, and her dad, Principal Carlsen, threatens and punches his way through town trying to find her.
How do Griffin and Hags get out of their parents’ party? They put them to sleep, or rather Hags does.
“You ROOFIED our parents?”
Who gives them a lift to the drunken ball at the Carnegie? Limo driver Pompano Mike (TonyCavalero), who’s not really from Pompano Beach, “I just like to live my life in a Florida state of mind.”
Mike’s blasted, and he knows the nickname for every drug in popular use at the moment — a little PCP on your pot?
“Dragon’s Breath, cheese tacoes, chicken tamales, Hip Hip Hooray, Monkey Punch, Deuces Wild, Pirates Booty, Toledo, Nuts a Bnuch, (Bridge) to Terabithia.”
There aren’t many laughs, although I chuckled at the “first ever drink of alcohol” (whisky, a mistake), kids frantically sucking down ketchup to put out the fire.
The drinking games of “The Gauntlet” contest include “Cocaine Scarface,” in which contestants snort a mountain of the stuff and do Al Pacino impressions every time they come up for air.
“The only ting een this world that gives orders…ees balls.”
The human chalupa punishment the kids faced — duct-taped together like “a Tootsie Roll,” is um, different.
And let’s not forget the song and dance sequence.
“We’re gonna get high, we’re gonna get baked
“Until every inch of us just aches!”
Vaughn resurrects his staccato speaking style, the kids are generic and dull — save for Franco, who deadpans some laughs into play.
The whole affair is just nuts, staggeringly irresponsible. No, a montage of “Just say no” public service announcements at the outset doesn’t excuse it.
It’ll be a chore, just keeping your kids from sneaking around to watch it.
Alcohol and narcotic content be damned, it’s fine. Kids can figure out it isn’t that funny call on their own.
MPAA Rating: unrated, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Skyler Gisondo, Dexter Darden, Grace Van Dien, Eduardo Franco, Zainne Saleh and Esteban Benito
Credits: Directed by Jeremy Garelick, script by Jordan VanDina. A Hulu release.
As primal as it is topical, “Buoyancy” is a brutal minimalist thriller about human trafficking in the largely-illegal Thai fishing industry.
The violence is a grim slice of reality, the human suffering shockingly common and well-documented. Australia’s selection for contention in the Best International Feature category in last year’s Oscars is a harrowing story of a handful of men on a rust-bucket fishing boat — some of them the brutish armed and well-fed crew, others the starved, overworked forced labor they’ve “bought” to do the dirty work.
For his debut feature, writer-director Rodd Rathjen uses little dialogue and simple imagery as he patiently tells the story of a 14 year-old Cambodian runaway, Chakra (Sarm Heng) who would rather take his chances in factory work in Thailand that slave away in the family rice paddies back home.
The fact that he has no money to pay the Cambodian equivalent of a “coyote,” the smuggler, means he will “go to a different factory” across the border. When he and a family man (Mony Ros) whom he throws in with are hustled about a boat “to take you to the factory,” the older man smells a rat.
The punches he takes tells us he’s not wrong. The look he gives the kid — helpless and despairing, answers the question he asked the kid when they first spoke.
“Is it worth the risk?”
They’re shuffled onto a 45 foot trawler, barked at and threatened as they dredge up the meager harvest in the over-fished waters of the Golf of Thailand. “What’s this for?” (in Khmer and Thai, with English subtitles) the kid wants to know.
“Dog food.”
The boy is sure they’re just working off their transport into Thailand debt. The man knows better, and grows more bitter by the day. He, like others, looks for ways to escape.
“We will die before we make it back. This is the sea of DEATH!”
The kid? He starts kissing up to the sadistic captain (Thanawut Ketsaro), fetching the pick of the day’s catch for him and his two paid crewmen — well-fed brutes who share a pistol — still hoping and expecting they will do this for a month or so, and be dropped ashore.
The first slave to get sick and give up disabuses the kid of that. Or should. The grinning skipper tosses him overboard. It won’t be the last murder, and yes — Google it. This enslavement and murder at sea of Indochinese and Burmese slave laborers is commonplace in Thailand’s un-regulated and corrupt-cop-protected fishing industry.
Will Chakra adapt? Will there be a mutiny? Will the crew, some of whom don’t speak the same language, figure out the math and a way to defeat the thugs with the gun?
Rathjen gets a lot of movie out of this uncomplicated story, patiently showing Chakra’s evolution, his hardening, the captain’s wary eyes taking in the kid’s increasingly callous turn.
The performances in “Buoyancy” are unfussy, unadorned and spot on, with Heng standing out, embodying a child quick to learn, trusting, headstrong and somebody who learns to not turn his back on anybody else even as they start to figure out they should treat him the same. Ketsaro is every grinning, brawny bully in the flesh, the embodiment of a man capable of anything because he fears no resistance or repercussions.
The detail, the worn-out wooden boat that is the main location, is perfect. And the calming effect of the sea is utterly spoiled by the tension that’s always there. Daily routine aside, every encounter with the pitiless crew is fraught with peril, and the violence when it comes — is shocking, primitive and sadistic.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Sarm Heng, Thanawut Ketsaro, Mony Ros
Credits: Written and directed by Rodd Rathjen. A Kino Lorber release.
All the speculation, the mystery spinning out of the trailers, the hype. And Christopher Nolan gives us his take on James Bond, tailor-made for our perilous times, a bang-on Bond film buddy picture set in Bizarro World.
“Tenet” unfolds like a screenwriting exercise, a time-bending work of back-engineering a plot from its end to its beginning, and then back again. It gives its heroes a simple dilemma — How do you outsmart somebody with access to the future, who can thus predict your every move?
It turns John David Washington into an action hero, Kenneth Branagh into a Russian supervillain and parks Robert Pattinson in an enviable sidekick role, and in skinny boy combat fatigues at one point. Let’s hope he bulks up before donning the Batsuit.
It promises two and a half hours of sitting in a theater, wearing a mask as we listen to Nolan characters try to make themselves heard through their masks. Kind of a thing with him. Dialogue is lost in many a noisy scene — the Bond style “opening gambit” assault on a Ukrainian opera house, the big bang Bond set piece finale, even in a bit of catamaran racing, where the wind and roar of racing foils cutting through the Mediterranean Sea drown out the words.
“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”
Awful things are afoot, and a CIA agent (Washington) is brought up to speed after a near death encounter with modern civilization’s irredeemable villains — Russians.
“Inverted” radioactive bullets point to somebody manipulating time, violently altering the present with help from the future.
The hunt for that “somebody” will require access to a lethally inaccessible Indian arms dealer (Dimple Kapadia), a model-gorgeous trophy wife/art appraiser (Elizabeth Debecki), a “free port” airport vault heist and meetings with and threats from the Russian monster who wants to end us all.
Stopping him will require the help of a mysterious British spy (Pattinson trots out a posh accent for that) and mastering the art of “inversion,” a brawl, shootout and car chase that runs backward and forward in time.
It will require a lot of things left unexplained.
“Ignorance is our ammunition.”
The story beats are Bond movie story beats, so there’s more awe at the spectacle than genuine surprise.
“Tenet,” for all its accents, masks and masked dialogue, does manage light touches. Michael Caine’s obligatory appearance isn’t necessary, but is a delight. And Washington and Pattinson click as reluctant “buddies,” even if Nolan never quite takes the picture there.
It’s an ambitious film, but that’s a given with Nolan.
It’s not his best, although perhaps some of that is a product of the extra months of breathless anticipation and speculation.
In the end, we do “feel it” more than we wholly understand it, despite many a pause to explain “the grandfather paradox” of time travel/history changing and the ways the international super rich avoid meddlesome laws and morality imposed on we mere mortals, with their own economy where those who serve them declare “We put no priority above your property.”
We accept Washington — who has screen presence, a wicked side-eye and a deftness in fight scenes, even if the charisma has a ways to go, even if most of his co-stars (Debecki especially) tower over him — as a bonafide action star.
I fretted over Branagh as a Russian heavy. But like Washington, he pulls it off and we accept him in the part.
All this hand-wringing on whether the next James Bond should be female, Asian or Black, and here the thinking film fan’s action sci-fi auteur has shown us the way — Nolan, as always, just ahead of the curve. “Tenet” is as much mind-challenging, action-packed fun as sitting in cinema wearing a mask for two and a half hours can be.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language
Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debecki, Clémence Poésy, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine, Himesh Patel, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Dimple Kapadia, Martin Donovan
Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. A Warner Brothers release.
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