The Japanese broadcaster NHK has a spot on many US cable systems, and on PBS affiliates’ HD alternate programming channels.
This documentary series is now mixed in with the news, music and travel programming that it carries.
Exquisite detail, fascinating agony that he and his team go through to make these hand drawn anime films.
A pervy lump of a landscaper gets his revenge by putting on the tights and lacing up the boots in “Wrestlemassacre,” a splatter film perfectly summed up by its title.
It’s an amateurish abomination of a splatter thriller thrown together by a filmmaker with access to a bunch of wrestlers, current or retired, and clumsily filmed somewhere in Pennsylvania, by the looks of things.
Not that any town’s putting up billboards advertising that fact.
The plot? Randy Sanchez (Richie Acevedo) is a put-upon loser who pines for Becky (Rosanna Nelson), who is dating one of his employers, deadbeat Owen (Julio Bana Fernandez).
Randy’s caught ogling somebody’s circus-grotesque girlfriend, put on leave from work, picked on by one and all and humiliated at the wrestling camp run by the aged Boogie (Jimmy Valiant). His retired-wrestler Dad (Josip Peruzovic) berates him as “an idiot.”
And as we’ve seen he talks to himself, and hears voices from a preacher on the TV, we know what’s coming.
He goes from being “the only undocumented Mexican groundskeeper in the state” (“But I’m CUBAN!”) to neck-snapping, finger-biting-off, arm-ripping avenger.
Gore-fans are made to endure an hour of “back story” to get to the geysers of fake blood. Well, aside from the obligatory chase a naked woman and her beau through the forest in the opening scene.
We’re treated to cross-dressing fake TV commercials, where performers can’t figure out their sight-lines and the edits don’t match, to a preacher who blows the pronunciation of “evangelical” to wrestling and fights that look awful, and acting acting that is far, far worse.
“Are you SERIOUS?”
“Serious as a rectal prolapse!”
The one plot element here that has a tiny bit of promise is the wrestling camp, and that was touched on by “Peanut Butter Falcon.” Google “wrestling camp” and you’ll see they’re all over the place, especially the rural South.
The one gimmick Brad Twig had going for him was rounding up all these colorful also-rans from the world of the ring — generations of them.
It’s a crying shame this is the movie he came up to use them in.
Cast: Richie Acevedo, Julio Bana Fernandez, Jimmy Valiant, Tony Atlas, Jimmy Flame, Manny Fernandez, Josip Peruzovic and Rosanna Nelson
Credits: Directed by Brad Twig, script by Matthew L. Furman and Brad Twig. A Wild Eye release.
Running time: 1:41
Paging all “Redskins,” “Braves” and “Indians” fans…
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
Movie Nation 