COVID numbers are spiking in states like Texas, Florida Michigan and NC and others.
But theater owners expect everybody to open by July 17 just to cash in on Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet.” Unless Warner Brothers blinks.
https://www.indiewire.com/2020/06/tenet-july-17-theaters-open-1202235450/
Its notoriety may be more historical than erotic, almost ninety years after its release. But the German drama “Madchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform)” retains its subtle power to move, a dated but still impressive landmark in queer cinema history.
The sexuality is implied, the repression overt, the style may not be stodgy or stagey but is plainly dated. Yet that one big speech suggesting that what the world long knew as “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” wasn’t the abomination religions had long decried it to be still packs a punch.
Set in a German girls boarding school just before World War I, it chastely relates the sexual awakening of an orphaned teen of the ruling Junkers class. And the woman who unintentionally drives that awakening? The teacher all the girls have a crush on.
The headmistress (Emilia Unda) preaches “Discipline, not a life of luxury” (in German with English subtitles) to her staff and her large student body. “Hunger and discipline will make us great again!”
She’s a dictator, and with her martinet assistant, presides over a school of lectures in the classics, languages, drama and the Bible, of hymns and privation and rules.
“No letters without prior approval…Hair must be tight.” Uniforms, with aprons must be worn at all times.
And “Books are verboten!”
Sad-eyed Manuela (Hertha Thiele) takes all this in. But her classmates mock the authoritarians behind their backs. Ringleader Isle (Ellen Schwanneke) gives Manuela the real skinny. You’re in Miss von Bernburg’s dorm? Lucky thing!
“Just don’t fall in love” with her. ALL the girls do.
Every longing gaze from the kind, softly-lit von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck) provokes silent sighs. But that kiss on the forehead good night?
“Wunderbar!”
And no matter how many warnings the headmistress lays on her staff, to “keep your distance” and how fraternizing “leads to infatuation,” Miss von Bernburg won’t be hard on her kids. She’s not listening to the rhetoric.
“The Fatherland needs people of steel!”
As daring as “Madchen” (and its 1958 Franco-German remake) are supposed to be, there’s not so much as a lip bitten in unspoken desire. But the signals are all here — girl-bonding in the locker-room, a motherly swat on the bottom that registers more delight than surprise, moon-eyed close-ups.
OK, that touch by director Leontine Sagan (“Showtime”) is obvious.
Tame as it now seems, “Madchen,” restored and re-issued via virtual cinema streaming (check your local art cinema’s website) is still a movie of prescience, poetry and honesty, essential viewing for anybody interested in the cinema as bellwether of change and indicator of the cultural cutting edge.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Hertha Thiele, Dorothea Wieck, Ellen Schwanneke and Emilia Unda.
Credits: Directed by Leontine Sagan , script by Christa Winsloe and Friedrich Dammann, based on the play by Christa Winsloe. A Kino Classics/Virtual Cinema release.
Running time: 1:30
As worn-out as the found-money wish fulfillment fantasy plot is, it still makes a useful framework to build morality tales, parables and social commentary on.
That’s what the Indian melodrama “Choked (Paisa Bolta Hai)” does. A troubled marriage, dashed dreams, money troubles and voila — cash just pops out of the family’s perpetually-stopped drain pipe.
The source of that money, the corrupting power of it and the way class conflict is played by Indian politicians — specifically Indian Prime Minister Nerandra Modi — all work their way into this slow and uneven if occasionally suspenseful and even amusing potboiler.
The bloom has gone off the rose in Sarita (Saiyami Kher) and Sushant’s (Roshan Mathew) marriage. He hasn’t worked regularly in years. He goofs off with the neighbors, picks at his guitar and doesn’t bother cooking or cleaning up in the tattered but roomy flat they raise their son in.
She’s a Mumbai bank teller struggling to keep them afloat, even as he adds debts to their burden. The teasing from his mates — “Sarita wears the pants in his house” (in Hindi with English subtitles) seems a small price to pay for being such a dead weight.
He even has the nerve to complain about her meals. So many potatoes!
“Potatoes for a couch potato!”
Things get so bad they shout at each other through their kid, ordering him to relay their angry arguments to each other.
Something happened between them, before their boy was born, a reality TV talent show where Sarita’s stage fright cost them their shot. Sushant never really got over it.
And then the noisy, ever-clogged pipes wake Sarita up in the middle of the night. She investigates, and plastic-covered rolls of cash fall out. This isn’t a Bollywood musical, a couple of songs and dance numbers notwithstanding. The cash didn’t magically appear as an answer to a prayer. We’ve seen strange men lugging suitcases to the apartment upstairs. Something’s going on.
Sarita keeps this discovery from Sushant, even as she tries to keep his meanest creditor at bay.
She’s sneaking around, fretting about being followed, slow to gain the confidence that makes her do what such fantasies dictate that she do — start spending. Nightmares, complications, threats and marital suspicions follow. Because Sushant is NOT the sort of fellow you can trust with this kind of news.
Then comes the ultimate complication. It’s 2016, and the prime minister has decreed that all 500 and 1000 rupee notes in circulation will be demonetized. There’s a run on banks, including Sarita’s, as everybody tries to swap the notes that are about to become useless.
Sushant, his pals and neighbors, dance and taunt those better off than them, lining up around the block in a panicked attempt to get new money before the sudden deadline.
“Corruption,” Modi says on the TV. “Counterfeit bills” and underground economy cash will be purged from circulation. But that money doesn’t just fund criminals and terrorists. And Sarita has all these bills to swap, right under the noses of her banking colleagues.
Director Anurag Kashyap of “Bombay Talkies” takes his sweet time (by Western standards, anyway) getting us into the story and escorting us to the finish. Gossiping neighbors, melodramatic mourning over a wedding that may not happen thanks to the currency exchange, hard feelings over Sushant’s business partnership gone bust and the added pressure of a shifty hotelier (Everybody is corrupt.) are what motivate Sarita’s nightmares.
And most of these plot decorations slow the movie down. A couple of scenes, including the finale, have an excruciating “For the love of God would get ON with it” quality.
But the journeys the characters take, their arcs, lift “Choked,” adding heart and a surprise twist or two.
Kher lets us see the wheels turn as Sarita does the calculus of what she wants to do, what she can do and what she might be forced to do. It makes more and more her sarcastic at home — she runs this house and drives this movie — and snappish at work. Little old ladies begging to change more money than allowed don’t move her newly hardened heart.
“Banks dole out cash, not sympathy.”
Mathew makes an agreeable heel.
And the whole is a more revealing slice of real Indian working lower middle class life than the confections served up by Netflix India typically manage.
“Choked” is not a very good film, but it’s a perfectly watchable and engrossing peek into a culture, its classes and its politics — governmental and sexual.
Cast: Saiyami Kher, Roshan Mathew, Amruta Subhash, Uday Nene
Credits: Directed by Anurag Kashyap, script by Nihit Bhave. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:53
“Death with Dignity” is a subject rich with drama and promise, and one avoided by most movie-makers because, “Seriously, who wants to think about that?”
But “Death with Dignity” earns a sad and sweet treatment in “Here Awhile,” an intimate indie drama about a young woman who travels home, to Oregon, for her final days.
Anna (Anna Camp of “Pitch Perfect” and “The Help”) leaves what we take to be a waiting room at a doctor’s office and makes her way back to Portland, checking in with the younger brother Michael (Steven Strait of “The Expanse”). They haven’t seen each other in years, and it’s a surprise visit. So there’s a bit of shouting, for starters.
But for his annoyance at how she “just took off” can’t last. He knows their Dad “threw your abomination lesbian sister out.” Now, Dad’s dead and they can reconcile, catch-up, scatter the old jerk’s ashes.
Only Anna’s always slipping off to throw up. “You OK?” is followed by “Not really” and “Can we talk?” She has cancer. It’s terminal. She’s come to a “death with dignity” state to make her exit.
“This is my life, what’s left of it. And I’ve got one move left.”
Helluva thing to dump on somebody, and Michael is going to have issues with her choice and the way she’s taking advantage of him, out of the blue, with this harsh news and his role in making her wishes come true.
“Here Awhile” doesn’t dwell on that conflict, and as Anna’s partner (Kristin Taylor) shows up and Michael’s girlfriend (Chloe Mason) makes an entrance, we pick up on the trauma of the siblings’ past (flashbacks), focus on Anna’s current needs and discover how Michael has grown up to be a natural caregiver who jst happens to work in IT.
For instance, there’s this app-building neighbor (veteran comic actor Joe Lo Truglio of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Reno 911!”) who is “on the spectrum” — Asperger’s, OCD, agoraphobia. Michael keeps an eye on him for his family, has control of his sugar intake and indulges his quirks.
“It means a lot. A lot of WHAT?”
Despite the third act step-by-step explainer of “How Death with Dignity Works,” “Here Awhile” is a light, somewhat superficial treatment of this.
Still, a movie on this subject coming out mid-pandemic, with friends, lovers and relatives dying — often alone in hospitals and nursing homes — can’t help but gain an extra poignancy.
There are beach visits and romantic montages set to music. Camp is another of those lovely actresses who looks too healthy to be dying.
But she and the more-competent-than-compelling supporting players keep this watchable, with even the standard-issue “adorable” take on Asperger’s going down easily.
When all is said and done, “Here Awhile” is here just long enough for Anna Camp to break your heart.
MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Anna Camp, Steven Strait, Joe Lo Truglio, Chloe Mason and Kristin Taylor.
Credits:Directed by Tim True, script by Csaba Mera and Tim True. A 1091 release.
Running time: 1:22
Sosa and McGuire chase the Roger Maris single season home run record.
Giddy times for cheaters. Meanwhile, Maris, whose only drugs were Schlitz and Camels, went to his grave without making the Hall of Fame.
This “30 for 30” film premieres June 14.
“Our country is down on its knees, begging, pleading, hurt, angry, frustrated, in pain, begging and pleading with its arms out just wanting to be heard” https://t.co/YSQuwikPmk https://twitter.com/THR/status/1269048874049642501?s=20
As moving and lovely as the Oscar-winning film biography “Walk the Line” was, we could tell, just watching it, that there was one part of the story that nobody involved was getting right.
And we could tell the filmmakers knew it. Casting spirited and earnest Ginnifer Goodwin as the wife Johnny Cash left for June Carter gave that away.
Vivian Liberto Cash Distin (she remarried) was “very private” her daughters all agree in “My Darling Vivian,” the touching and revealing new documentary about their mother.
Conflicting memories, half-forgotten family lore makes the accounts by Roseanne Cash and her sisters Tara, Cindy and Kathy not sync up, here and there. But this much is clear. This was a love affair and a story straight out of a country song. It’s just that the song would have been one by Tammy Wynette and George Jones, not the Man in Black.
Built on extensive interviews with the siblings — leaning most heavily on the famous daughter, Roseanne — home movies, decades of TV appearances by their father and the movie biographies that “hurt” their mother (“Walk the Line,” “Ring of Fire” and even the parody, “Walk Hard”), filmmaker Matt Riddlehoover finally gives the press-shy Vivian, who died in 2005, her voice — her chance to tell this story.
“Walk the Line” painted a portrait of a provincial wife who needed to be escaped so that Johnny– drug addicted, overworked and troubled — could be redeemed by June. Vivian was all but written out of the Cash saga.
“Honestly,” Cindy Cash says, “I don’t think anyone had an impression of her before that,” and so it stuck.
Riddlehoover, whose prior films were all gay romances and melodramas, sets out to tell the forgotten story of this invisible woman, someone pretty much erased from Cash’s “hero’s journey.”
Vivian Liberto was a Catholic San Antonio girl swept off her feet by handsome Airman Cash when he was briefly stationed there in the service. A thousand letters and tapes he sent her from his station in Germany underscore how “besotted” they were, as Roseanne puts it.
We hear the earliest recordings of Johnny Cash singing in those reel-to-reel letters.
The sisters, interviewed separately, give slightly differing versions of this or that bit of their history. But they all agree that there were several versions of their mother, that she kept it together and kept them going early on, and seemed crushed and broken when their father strayed.
“The happiest years” were in Memphis, right after their marriage and the quick births of Roseanne and her sisters. Then Cash moved them west to California to pursue an elusive film career, TV appearances and the like. Pills, even more touring and the eventual split in the family followed.
Vivian Liberto comes off as a tragic and romantic stiff-upper-lip figure who endured repeated humiliations, such as Cash’s El Paso pills arrest, which led to the whole “Johnny Cash is married to a Negress” headlines throughout the racist South thanks to her “exotic” dark looks in court photos. It’s just that she took these blows less stoically than her public silence would have had us believe. Her daughters worried about her health and her sanity even though they were too young to process what they were living through with her back then.
“Vivian” makes for a fascinating account of the psychological scars of a divorce, borne mainly by their reserved, internalizing mother but rippling through to the daughters.
And boy, do we see June Carter Cash in a different light — from family friend to betrayer, to mouthy talk show guest joke-complaining about “how tired” raising “our kids” made her — even those that weren’t hers and that she didn’t raise.
Roseanne, the eldest sister, is 65 now. There’s little trace of bitterness or even edge in her voice, no sense that old scores are being settled, with Nashville lore and Country Music History of that Carter and Cash “epic love story” being rewritten. But man, you can see the satisfaction in Roseanne’s eyes as she and her sisters finally get the chance to give their mother the voice and the platform she lacked over all those decades.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Roseanne Cash, Kathy Cash, Cindy Cash, Tara Cash.
Credits: Directed by Matt Riddlehoover. A Film Collaborative release
Running time: 1:30
Well, maybe we don’t all have as much time to kill as we did a month or three ago. A lot of people are going back to work, after all.
So two and a half hours of a dawdling wank of a heist thriller from Olivier Megaton (“Taken 2,” “Transporter 3”) wasn’t the worst way for Netflix to spend its production money. But it’s close.
“The Last Days of American Crime,” based on a “very near future” comic book tale, is about pulling off the last big robbery before API, a new “signal” that will stop criminals from committing crimes, is switched on.
Clocks are counting down, the TV yakkers are debating the morality and Constitutionality of it all. The People? They’re running wild in the streets, getting it out of their system, with the One Percent (pro jocks included) trying to flee to Canada.
Yeah, it’s “The Purge,” with no social commentary, no conscience, no soul and very little entertainment value.
Edgar Ramirez is Brick, a bank robber in Detroit, I guess (on the border), a guy we meet as he tortures somebody so we don’t feel so bad when he himself is tortured later.
Anna Brewster (TV’s “Versailles”) is Shelby, skinny young thing attached to crime-boss son Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt of “Rob the Mob” and TV’s “Boardwalk Empire,” amped-up as ever). But she’s more than arm-adornment. Shelby is our narrator, because Shelby dreamed up the caper.
They’ll hit “The Money Factory,” grab a bundle and make for Canada just before the API signal ends crime in America.
“Last Days” is a movie of indeterminate settings (I didn’t hear anybody say “Detroit”), bit players with unexplained European accents, lots of shouting and odd moments of shooting.
South African Sharlto Copley, doing his best American accent ever, is kind of lost in the mix as a cop about to be — in essence — made obsolete for a high-pitched “signal” that removes “free will” (the will to be a crook), discourages, punishes and can even kill.
Everybody has “one week left to make your own choices,” which means they’d all best get a move on.
Megaton — “Colombiana” was his best film — is a great big pile of bad directing, and the action beats here don’t hide that. He relies too much on voice-over, and can’t quite tell when a sentence an actor utters makes no GD sense whatsoever.
“Like I told you, if you don’t have a contract on your head in my family, it means they don’t like you.”
There’s a little “getting too old for this” you-know-what, a dash of “Sometimes you get to see the bullet that has your name on it,” a lot of neon blended in with the urban wasteland that passes for production design.
The caper is routine, the twists don’t — twist. “American Crime” just lies there, a corpse awaiting reanimation that never comes.
Pitt does this loopy, deranged, gonzo criminal thing as well as anybody and gives us something to look at.
Brewster’s big break includes some tough talk, short skirts and the obligatory sex-in-the-filthy-bar-bathroom scene. How I long for the day actresses aren’t subjected to that degradation.
I like Ramirez, of “Hands of Stone,” “Point Break,” “Joy, “The Girl on the Train” and “The Liberator.” And I will like him again once I’ve forgotten this, which will be any minute now.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, drug content, profanity
Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Anna Brewster, Michael Pitt and Sharlto Copley.
Credits: Directed by Olivier Megaton, script based on the graphic novel. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:29
The problem with “Mr. Topaz” is underlined, under-scored and trumpeted at approximately one hour in to this “lost” Peter Sellers comedy. That’s when Sellers’ “Pink Panther” foil, Herbert Lom bursts on the screen, jolts the lethargic back to life and hints at the years of glorious toe-to-toe moments that would begin the second time they teamed up on screen.
He “sets up” Sellers’ simple, righteous French school teacher (the title role) as a front for some shady businesses he runs. He bowls Sellers over with his bluff presence, his (faux) French charm, his “My dear Topaz” reassurances.
And when someone (John Le Mesurier) shows up to threaten Topaz with exposure, ruin and prison, it is the oily menace of Castel Benac (Blom) who sizes him up and deals with the problem.
“Tell me, is this your first go at blackmail?” he purrs.
This legendary 1961 bomb was Sellers’ first and (supposedly) only go at directing a feature film. He was nearing the peak of his stardom, fresh off the success of “The Millionairess,” on his way to “Lolita” and “Doctor Strangelove.” And the myth about it was that Sellers retrieved every copy of this 20th Century Fox (which released it as “I Like Money” in the US) Cinemascope/Eastmancolor bust and burned them, so great was his shame.
Well, he didn’t get them all. The British Film Institute held onto it, and restored it for BluRay last year, and now it’s here for Sellers completists to pore over and debate.
He may have been playing another incorruptible, honest man (as in “The Millionairess”). But he was his own worst enemy, too distracted as director and star to find the laughs, too vain to notice there weren’t any.
Mr. Topaz is a provincial French school teacher between the wars, happy enough in his work with the pranking little boys in his charge, hopeful that the flirtations of a fellow teacher (Billie Whitelaw, who went on to do “Frenzy,” “Start the Revolution Without Me” and “Hot Fuzz”) aren’t just because she wants him to grade her papers for her.
She’s the daughter of the greedy, imperious headmaster (Leo McKern), which makes it unlikely that there’ll ever be wedding bells. Not that Topaz’s pal Tamise (Michael Gough, Batman’s butler when Michael Keaton wore the cowl) lets him give up.
There are lengthy scenes where Tamise bucks up Topaz, tells him “that’s what women) want — a man.” He reassures him that he’s handsome — “You know, from certain angles, you look positively leonine!”
And Sellers, as Topaz, eats this up even as these laughless scenes drag on for an hour. Encounters with the wealthy nightclub and musical theater singing “aunt” (Nadia Gray) of a little boy Topaz tutors (Michael Sellers, Peter’s little boy), debates with Tamise about the righteousness of teaching small children, all delay us from getting to the movie’s point.
Which is tempting and testing the naive idealist with corruption. Children “shield us from all the greed and selfishness in the world.” When temptation arises, Topaz declares “There is no profit in ill-gotten gains!”
Original playwright and screenwriter Marcel Pagnol must’ve been a communist. I jest. Because somebody has to.
The weakest Sellers films always showcased him as guarded, too dignified to do that pompous-man-made-the-fool thing he mastered as Inspector Clouseau. That wasn’t the only trick up his sleeve, as “Being There,” “The Party” and “After the Fox” proved. But the formerly fat funnyman let his “I’m a dashing ladykiller” delusions get in the way of the fun in many a film he didn’t feel challenged him.
He hired McKern (“The Mouse that Roared,” “Help!”), John Neville (“Baron Munchausen”), Lom and Whitelaw and got barely a laugh out of any of them.
Sellers comes off as earnest, committed but lost trying to figure out how to shape this thing into a funny parable, so lost he can’t tell he’s boring us to death with an hour of establishing Topaz is a teacher of “unimpeachable integrity” before he gets to anything even remotely promising.
Since he only got to make 50 or so movies, and only directed one (he’s credited for directing some of his final film, “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu”), that’s the tragedy of “Mr. Topaz.” We want every Sellers film to be “The Ladykillers” or “The Mouse That Roared” or “The World of Henry Orient.” And too often they weren’t, even though the paydays were growing.
“I Like Money” — the American title seems to suit, now — is for Sellers completists only.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Peter Sellers, Nadia Gray, Leo McKern, Herbert Lom,Billie Whitelaw, Michael Gough and John Neville.
Credits: Directed by Peter Sellers script by Pierre Rouve, based on the play and later screenplay by Marcel Pagnol. A Film Movement Plus streaming release.
Running time: 1:37
The best of the “bingeworthy” dramas in this, the golden age of streaming, are true “limited series.”
They’re the TV equivalent of a good genre novel, a “page turner.” They give you a beginning, a layered, ever-more-revealing, twisty middle, and an end — a conclusion.
The Belgian bank robbery/hostages thriller “The Day (De Dag)” gives you a lot to wrestle with in its introduction and challenges you right up to the series finale. So many characters, so many intrigues, the occasional competing agenda, the odd “Wait, she’s WHAT?” make it the quintessential crime “page turner.”
It’s about “The Day” of a crime, and is seen from the point of view of both the police, mustering outside, summoning hostage negotiators (Sophie Decleir, Lukas De Wolf and Willy Thomas) and the handful of hostages and the criminals “trapped” inside a Belgian bank. These points-of-view are explored semi-separately, in alternating episodes.
Yes, that’s gimmicky and repetitive. But the viewer’s perception is altered in each episode — the negotiator who may be “green,” the distraught and grieving heiress (Maaike Neuville) accidentally trapped inside, the hatefully rebellious teen girl (Imani De Caestecker) who shows she can redirect her rage when her kid brother is threatened.
North American viewers should find its differing police tactics, even if the SWAT armor and tiny cameras drilled through the walls (the gear) seems the same. Reading the Dutch word for police, “Politie” and seeing cops interact with criminals, victims, family and rule-benders in the press, the “polite” contrast with American law enforcement is stark.
Masked gunmen have slipped into a scaled-down branch of FidesBank, grabbing an employee or three, and whoever was hitting the sealed-off lobby ATM, by accident.
A cell-phone is left dangling at the door to speak to the cops with as they seal the place explosive devices and settle in for a siege they plainly came prepared for.
Or did they? As “The Day” unfolds (in Dutch with English subtitles), we may think “inside job” only to be steered away from it in the next episode. We rightfully wonder, “Why is there a vault in a store room hidden behind cardboard boxes?”
Did the crooks mean for the fabric firm’s heiress, grieving from the recent suicide of her brother, to be there? What will they do with teenage Noor (De Caestecker) and her baby brother Basil?
The most intriguing bits to me were in the hostage negotiator van, where Vos (Declair) is letting new guy Ibrahim (De Wolf) handle the phone calls, and where senior man Roeland (Willy Thomas) pieces together a profile of who they’re up against just by the demands, the language used, the tenor of the voice and their responses to this counter offer or that bit of “pressure.”
You watch as many movies and TV series like this as I have and you can’t help but place a premium on any that serves up a big dose of “What the hell is going on here?”
Straight hostages-for-cash caper? Money laundering? Blackmail? What is it they plan to do with the cash? How will they make their getaway?
It takes two episodes for the first “cop movie/TV show” cliche to show up.
“When did you start smoking again?”
The repetition may be wearing, and the penurious way plot, motives and simple character names and relationship are explained — there are a LOT of moving parts here — is challenging.
But the way all these people, pieces and plans are integrated and broken down will keep you on task for all 12 episodes of “The Day.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Willy Thomas, Imani De Caestecker, Johan van Assche, Maaike Neuville, Lukas De Wolf, Bob Snijers, Geert Van Rampelberg, Sophie Decleir
Credits: Created by Jonas Geirnaert. Streaming on Topic.
Running time: 12 episodes @38-48 minutes each
Movie Nation 