Marlon Wayans and “Atlanta” alumnus Tyriq Withers star in this horror allegory about “What are you willing to sacrifice” for the fleeting fame of an NFL career?
Aside from CTE, wrecked joints, shortened life span, etc?
Great timing, with the NFL/college football seasons freshly launched, a little pushback for the Sport that Ate America’s Soul.
Slapping Jordan Peele’s name on this as a producer is a plus, suggesting this could more than skin deep.
“HIM” hits theaters Sept. 19.
“Black Panther,” “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station” director Ryan Coogler sets his sights on horror with “Sinners,” a sprawling Depression Era tale of race, religion and “The Devil’s Music,” the blues.
Coogler immerses us in the early ’30s South where a couple of Black WWI vets who became Chicago gangsters return to their hometown with swagger and the guns to back it up to open a juke joint. The trip into “erased” history, violence and reminders of the cross cultural “melting pot” — Black entrepreneurs, a Chinese grocery, Jewish ice vendors — that reached even small town Mississippi is fascinating.
But hanging over these twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan) and their dreams for an old saw mill they want to buy from a klansman is the memory of the movie’s opening scene, a bloodied young bluesman (Miles Caton), clutching the remains of his resonator (steel) guitar, facing his preacher-father (Saul Williams) in the pulpit.
“You keep dancin’ with the Devil, one day he’s gonna come home with you.”
From the look of things, that’s exactly what happened. And whatever promise the picture makes as it unfolds, it’s still got to end up there, where a hundred and sixty earlier and far less ambitious films finished.
Preacher Boy Sammy may sing in church on Sundays. But Saturday nights are for the blues. That’s why he’s the first man his cousins, Smoke and Stack (Jordan) look up when they roll back into town. A juke joint’s got to have a headliner. And legendary harmonic player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) can’t carry the load alone.
The Chinese grocers (Li Jun Li and Yao) can provide the catfish and side dishes. And the twins have brought their own booze, “Irish beer,” in a truck from Chicago, which they’re prepared to defend with their Colt 45s.
Old acquaintances (Omar Benson Miller) must be renewed and recruited. They have to get the word out to folks working cotton fields all day. The white power structure looms in the background. And one brother has an old lover (Hailee Steinfeld) to contend with, adding to their complications. But grand opening night is sure to be filled with music, drink, socializing and sex .
That instant success at Club Juke can only be interrupted by race. A trio of Scotch-Irish bluegrass “mountain music” players led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell) would love to join in and mingle their shared musical heritage. But “inviting” them or even shooing them away in means trouble.
The performances are top drawer, with Jordan and Lindo and Steinfeld crackling and newcomer Caton singing and playing with an authenticity it’s hard to fake.
Coogler introduces themes, agendas and histories in collision with this film. But once “Sinners” transitions from Black history at a crossroads into straight-up horror, nothing much is made of the Big Ideas in this ungainly mashup of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Crossroads” and “From Dust Til Dawn.”
The narrative narrows and surviving the night’s mayhem is treated in Tarantino/Rodriguez wish-fulfillment-fantasy strokes as machine guns and grenades, racists and “haints” or whatever those Irish-accented Carolina mountaineers crooning “Wild Mountain Thyme” turn out to be takes over.
After the care taken to place this story in time and set it in motion, that played to me as a terrible letdown. You build your picture up to “American Saga” length and this is the payoff?
Since “Black Panther” and “Creed,” there’s barely a trace of “Fruitvale Station” Coogler in his built-to-be-blockbusters recent films. But I still felt let down by the third act of “Sinners,” almost embarrassed for a filmmaker with big “Mudbound” ideas abandoned and flippant, absurdly over-the-top crowd-pleasing slaughter served-up instead.
Rating: R, gruesome, gory violence, sex, profanity
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Li Jun Li, Yao and Delroy Lindo.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryan Coogler. A Warner Bros. release.
Running time: 2:17
The last thing you want to sense in an animated movie for children is cynicism, filmmakers and financiers who make no effort to hide their desire to turn over an easy buck by selling something to kids.
The “Space Jam” movies reeked of that, product placement (the NBA, Looney Tunes characters) masquerading as “movies.”
There’s plenty of cynicism in the trippy bore “Sneaks,” a film that tries to tap into “sneaker culture” and the hoop dreams attached to footwear, especially among inner city African American youth.
It’s not the Converse, Nike and Adidas jokes and plugs alone that make this Briarcliff Entertainment enterprise dubious. But there’s so little entertainment value that throwing a long list of famous, semi-farmous and used-to-be-famous voices at it looks and sounds like desperation. Which it is.
A couple of animation filmmakers with Disney credentials — writer and co-director Rob Edwards scripted the delightful “Princess and the Frog” — and a production that hired a “Sneaker Culture Consultant” turned out a modestly animated quest about two designer sneakers separated from each other and their rightful owner, a baller with “dreams,” in the big city.
Anthony Mackie voices Ty, half of the pair of Alchemy 24s (with sister Maxine (Chloe Bailey) that teen baller Edson (Swae Lee) hopes will help him make his mark on the basketball court. A hulking villain, The Collector (Laurence Fishburne) with a thing for designer athletic footwear steals the pricey shoe Edson could only acquire by winning a contest.
Maxine is to be put on display in a high-rise flat packed with rare shoes and a sea of Converse boxes. Ty, stumbling around until he hooks up with J.B. (Martin Lawrence), the sort of streetwise shoe that hangs from electrical wires in cities and towns all over America, can guide him through uptown towards his goal.
A Greek chorus of hanging sneakers comments on the quest as Ty and J.B. venture through a shoe underworld of dumpsters and nightclubs, where they mix with stilettos and swells from other strata of society. They even encounter a Brit-accented Broadway type in sneaker form.
“Perhaps you saw me in ‘The Taking of the Shoe.’ ‘Twelfth Nike?’ Much Adidas about Nothing?”
Rats must be fought off, skateboards and buses ridden and clues collected to track down Maxine.
Meanwhile, Maxine and other “collected” shoes await their fate as The Collector fights with The Forger (Roddy Ricch) for legitimacy in a world of stolen, half-shredded, worn-out and even counterfeit footwear.
“Sneaker culture consultant.” Right.
There’s barely a chuckle in any of it. The shoes “look” right, but no effort was made to make the eyes even “Cars” expressive, and that’s a low bar.
I kept thinking of the indie animated stinker “Tugger: The Jeep 4×4 Who Wanted to Fly,” another product placement in search of an animated story that would sell it to kids. I strained to make out the voice actors, who include Macy Gracy and Keith David.
And I kept a close eye on my watch. Because time stops when you’re grinding through a cynical bore like “Sneaks.”
Rating: PG
Cast: The voices of Anthony Mackie, Laurence Fishburne, Macy Gray, Swae Lee, Ella Mai, Amira McCoy, Roddy Ricch, Keith David and Martin Lawrence
Credits: Directed by Rob Edwards and Christopher Jenkins, scripted by Rob Edwards. A Briarcliff Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:32
More charming than amusing, chosing sentiment over “edge,” the Andrew Ahn remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 queer cinema classic “The Wedding Banquet” gives the viewer time to reflect on just how much American and world culture have changed in the past 30+ years.
Lee’s film, about a gay Chinese-American who marries a female tenant renting an apartment from him as a way of appeasing and fooling his traditional Chinese family, seems positively demure now. The characters are tentative, dreading “coming out” and going to great extremes to ensure that they don’t have to.
Ahn (“Driveways”) gives his film hip cachet in casting Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Joan Chen in lead roles. He recognized that the comic possibilities of fooling relatives in The Old Country (Korea, this time) are exhausted, and moved beyond that as gracefully as he could.
If his picture lacks the understated delight that the original “Banquet” provided and fails to find many laughs in that promising cast, he at least charts the journey from gay “stereotypes” to gay “archetypes.”
Gladstone and Tran play Lee and Angela, a long-paired lesbian couple struggling to conceive via In Vitro fertilization. Yang and Hang Gi-chan are Chris and Min, the gay couple renting the garage apartment in the house Lee inherited from her father.
Lee, a “professional” lesbian (activist, organizer, etc) and “worm” scientist Angela are feeling the psychological and financial strain of trying to have a baby. Chris and Min have other issues, with older Chris having put-off finishing his Phd — “Queer Theory takes the joy out of being queer!” — and quick to rebuff Min’s proposal.
Min’s a perpetual student, an artist in cloth and a Korean citizen. Is the marriage for a Green Card? The fact that his homophobic grandfather will cut him off from the family fortune should he come out worries Chris more than it does Min.
Why not fake-marry Angela instead? Appease Zoom-call businesswoman granny (Youn Yuh-jung), get that Green Card and provide the family cash necessary for Angela and Lee to finally have a baby?
The movie introduces this epiphany and that jolting turn of events every bit as abruptly as that description implies.
Old friends Angela and Chris get weepy drunk over this idea and wake up naked. And then Granny shows up and the whole scheme struggles to get on its feet.
Casting Yang, famed for his bitchy, adenoidal put-downs, promises more laughs than this “Wedding Banquet” delivers. The first forty minutes are deathly dull. Then the fake marriage plot is set in motion and things pick up a bit for at least part of the remainder of the film.
Yang and Hang have little chemistry, in contrast with Tran and Gladstone, who click as a couple and make the buy-in easy.
Ahn’s efforts to deepen the Taiwan/America cultural contrast of the original film by mixing up Chinese and Korean and Native American characters (Bobo Lee plays Chris’s lesbian hipster cousin) comes to almost nothing — a hint of cuisine, a drag vamp on Chinese dragon costumes, a little Korean customs and Chinese culture bashing.
Screen legend Chen (“Twin Peaks,” “The Last Emperor,””Marco Polo,” “Didi”) is a breath of fresh air as Angela’s overbearing, over-sharing mother, a woman “all-in” on the who PFLAG super-supportive Mom thing, which infuriates her fuming daughter. Chen and Youn (“Minari”) almost set off sparks and suggest another promising angle Ahn didn’t choose to develop.
The few antic bits play. The rush to “de-queer” the house when Granny is coming shows DVDs, CDs and the Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page autobiography grabbed and hidden, along with a Lilith Faire concert poster.
“The Indigo Girls are surprisingly popular in Korea!”
But this “Banquet” never gets up a head of steam, never unravels into anything fun. Yang ensured that they’d have enough zingers to make the trailer funny. The film itself is more recognizably human and considered, while lacking any comic edge or sense that the romantic stakes are high.
When the climax lurches into the anti-climax, it’s hard to see what much of the fuss of any of this would have been about, when even the most transgressive moments have lost their sting.
But that’s just the final confirmation of shifts in the culture. “Coming Out” stories are passe, and half-heartedly flipping their twists won’t change that, no matter how much pushback the reactionary culture seems to embrace at the moment.
Rating: R, nudity, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Hang Gi-chan, Bobo Lee, Youn Yuh-jung and Joan Chen.
Credits: Directed by Andrew Ahn, scripted by Andrew Ahn, based on the screenplay to “The Wedding Banquet” by James Schamus. A Bleecker Street release.
Running time: 1:42
A kiddie comedy about that special pair of sneakers who carry a young baller’s dream, separated by “The Collector,” with one Sneaker seeking his mate…
You’d expect to hear the voice of Martin Lawrence in it, but Anthony Mackie and Lawrence Fishburne?
I may not review it because it isn’t all that. (OK, I did review it.)
But with a “Sneaker Culture” consultant/tour guide listed in the credits, it’s the nuttiest idea to turn into a kiddie cartoon. Or one of the nuttiest.
Had the mood of of the audience and indeed the country changed since “Wicked One” opened last fall?
Whatever cheery optimism the overproduced blockbuster engendered is going to find a steeper hill to climb when this “Wicked” this way comes Nov. 21.
Foster plays a man obsessed with saving drivers from themselves as they try to take the intersection where he lives at dangerous speeds.
Smulders is the wife trapped in this obsession.
This thriller drops April 23.
The end of feudalism, the rise of imperialism and 11 convicts stand guard over a frontier fort, facing modernized infantry and artillery.
It’s “Seven Samurai” with 11 “bandits,” a touch of “47 Ronin” and “The Last Samurai” inspired by a “true story.”
June 10, this one drops.
“Squad 36” is a ponderous Parisian police procedural that never seems to get out of its own way. Staggering from cliche to contrivance, there’s little doubt what climax the stock characters who inhabit it are headed to, and that there’ll be an anti-climax after that.
Dirty cops, dangerous gangs, intrasquad romance and police who take care of their own, it’s a French variation of that tried and true hook of American cop pictures since “Colors.” That truism “The police are just another gang” bears repeating as much of the world seems indoctrinated to the “Law & Order/Bluebloods” myth of those who “protect and serve.”
It’s a milieu where French actor turned writer-director Olivier Marchal (“Rogue City”) has found a home. Perhaps he’s too comfortable in that home for his own good.
We meet the titular six-member Anti-Crime Ssquad as Sami (Tefix Jallab), Vinny (Guillaume Pottier), Walid (Youssef Ramal), biker Hanna (Juliette Dol), Richard (Soufiane Guerrab) and Antoine (Victor Belmondo) chase canny and tough-looking mob figure Karim (Jean-Michel Correia) all over the rainy streets of Paris.
A couple of things leap to mind in this opening sequence. Why are they pursuing this armed gangster, when they won’t arrest him? Why have Hanna — the lone woman on the team — lose control of her bike so that star Belmondo (the grandson of you-know-who) can take over?
And aren’t ALL police squads “anti-crime?”
Sami is the on-task boss of them all, answering to an impatient, CYA/C-his-A higher up (Yvan Attal). But Antoine is meant to be the “colorful” one. He’s seeing Hanna on the sly. And he takes out his over-the-top aggression on foes in underground, no-holds-barred brawling for bucks.
That’s what gets Antoine kicked out to the suburbs to “a department with less confrontation.” His colleagues may insist he got a raw deal, but we know better.
Months later, when members of the squad turn up dead and one goes missing, Antoine is lured back into this lurid world of nightclubs, overlapping jurisdictions, suspect cops and suspect mobsters. Because come what may, cops take care of their own.
Adapting a novel by Michel Tourscher, Marchal fills the screen with assorting police units with varying agendas with Antonoine running afoul of some and secretly supported by others.
The violence can be sudden and random and visceral. But once we get past the “cop in fight club” first act, the narrative settles into duller shoe-leather police work, following this tip, making that contact, working outside the law because the insiders don’t want him messing around in all this.
“You mind your own business and there won’t be any repercussions” is as menacing in French (with subtitles) as it is dubbed into English.
I like the suggestions of and open displays of corruption — stealing cash from an evidence locker, higher-ups shuffling wayward cops from job to job like pedophile priests.
At least in French cop movie funerals they don’t trot out bagpipes.
But when a picture bogs down into talky, relationshippy middle-acts like this one, the viewer gets ahead of it. The big mystery is easily guessed, and early. Characters don’t have motives or relationships that aren’t contrived, simply ordained by screenwriterly convenience.
Belmondo is convincingly tough and flinty, but has a generic screen presence that suggests “supporting player with a famous last name.”
Correia, as the 50ish mobster, brings weight and charisma and layers to his role. Everybody else here is just a cog in the clumsy collective presented here, cops and killers doing what they do the way they’ve done it in hundreds of pictures just like this, many of them better than the sedentary “Squad 36.”
Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Victor Belmondo,
Tewfik Jallab, Yvan Attal, Juliette Dol,
Soufiane Guerrab,
Jean-Michel Correia,
Lydia Andrei, Guillaume Pottier and Youssef Ramal
Credits: Directed by Olivier Marchal, scripted by and Olivier Dujois and Olivier Marchal, based on a novel by Michel Tourscher. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:08
An all star cast includes Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Allison Janney, Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon.
And Benedict Cumberbatch in a straight up dysfunctional marriage comedy.
Yes, it’s a remake of the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas farce, both films are based on Warren Adler’s dark dark novel.
These Roses” bloom at the end of August.
Movie Nation 