The premise has promise. Your kid’s had an accident, you’re racing to help, or do damage control.
“Don’t let her DIE Alice!”
Parents dash to carry out a coverup to protect their daughter?
What’s odd about this May 16 horror offering is that Universal picked it up from budget-thriller distributor XYZ Films.
Looks tense, and Pike always delivers.
Dopey horror about a gathering on an idyllic island which one person can win as their very own if they catch or “bag” the most feral dogs who escaped a movie shoot there years before.
Hayden Panatierre, Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner are the “names” in the cast. The murderous doggies are the stars.
May 16
Festival buzz for this June release has been pretty good. Pretty pretty pretty good.
Festival Groupthink? It’s totally a thing. But we’ll see. In June.
There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy “Daddy.” Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.
Arch, dry and dark, it’s an alt-future version of “testing” a quartet of candidates in their suitability for fatherhood. Toxic masculinity, religious dogmatism, hapless, hope-for-the-best slacking and daddy dilettantism come into play in co-writers/co-directors/co-stars’ Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman‘s not-quite-funny satire.
Jeremy (Sherman) sits for an AI interview with FRANN, the Fatherhood Research Aptitude Neural Network, who gives him a word association test to determine his fitness for fathering. Somehow, he hems and haws and insists “I’m ready, I’m TOTALLY ready” his way past this first quiz.
That means he gets to go on a Dept. of Procreating’s fatherhood retreat, where his final fitness will be determined.
Hapless, “fatherhood is a feeling” Jeremy is parked in a remote, mountain valley house with guitar playing cynic and possible INCEL Mo (Pomme Koch), piously religious and married Andrew (Kelley), and paranoid, pushy biz bro Sebastian (Yuriy Sardorov of “Argo” and TV’s “Chicago P.D.”).
They’re deprived of their cellular devices and dropped off. They meet and wait for their “monitor” to show up and evaluate them. They wait some more. And then they start to wonder if they’re simply being “watched” to decide if they’re fit to be fathers.
A couple of guys have a touchy edge, one uses his religion as comfort and rationalization for how he behaves and Jeremy just sort of steps into it and wings it as they prep meals, play cards, chat and make up their own DIY exercises (save your baby from a mugger and/or an earthquake) using a baby doll they figure was left there for that purpose.
They’re starting to fray, tensions are flaring and Sebastian’s bossy paranoia has put them all on edge. And then a “lost” woman (Jacqueline Toboni) shows up.
The performances work even if the deadpan “jokes” never quite land.
“I’m a runner.”
“Oh. I used to run track.” Pause. “800 meters.” Pause.
“OK.”
The dumbest Battle of Waterloo discussion/allegory ever is passed over for a debate about whether they should stay, try to hike out or whether indeed they’re being “watched.”
The players make their assorted character “types” somewhat distinct caricatures. But the choices the script has characters abruptly make or nonsensically dismiss doesn’t give the narrative manuevering room to settle someplace interesting.
The payoff is kind of predictable, and not in a good way.
But it’s worth dipping into the many “Daddy” issues here just to figure out what our first-time writer-directors were trying to say, even if they never actually say it.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Yuriy Sardorov, Neal Kelley, Jono Sherman, Pomme Koch and Jacqueline Toboni.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman. An Anchor Bay release (streaming)
Running time: 1:38
Ken Loach built his career on films of protest, depicting the oppressed of many places and many eras in their struggle against their oppressors.
The Brit’s “socialist realism” was obvious from his breakthrough English working class classic “Kes,” with the Irish Republican thriller “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” and the Spanish Civil War” drama “Land and Freedom” among the career highlights as he’s bounced from socially aware documentaries (“McLibel”) to working class exposes (“I, Daniel Blake” and “Sorry We Missed You”) and comedies (“Jimmy’s Hall”).
Loach announced his retirement a couple of years back. But that just gives his fans and cineastes a chance to finally catch up on all the good films he made that we’ve missed.
“Black Jack” seems, on first glance, a little out of character. A Dickensian drama of the “Great Expectations” school, it’s set pre-Dickens, a sharply-observed thriller of working class trials and tests of the pre-Industrial Revolution child labor era — 1750.
It’s modest and downright primitive, with period-correct Cockney that almost requires subtitles, and yet it’s a beautifully realized period piece, a reminder that somebody had to be serving, waiting on and driving the carriages of all those Jane Austen heroines and their landed swells suitors.
The carriages and stagecoaches get muddy, the predatory rich are preyed upon by the just-as-clever predatory poor and the entire picture, with its “unimproved” roads, rough trade and roughly-clothed characters, feels lived-in and thanks to the spring shooting schedule, dewy and verdant.
And the more the story unfolds, the more this adaptation of a Leon Garfield novel resembles “Great Expectations.”
Jean Franval plays the title character, a Frenchman named “Black Jack” “because nobody could pronounce his real name.”
We meet him as he’s prepped for the gallows, a murderer about to meet justice. But we don’t get to know him until his body is delivered to the business of Mrs. Gorgandy (Pat Wallis), a widow who makes her living providing corpses for scientific-minded surgeons.
A draper’s apprentice, Bartholomew (Stephen Hirst) is charged with “watching over” the corpse while Mrs. Gorgandy goes out to complete the sale, so the boy of about 12 is the first to realize Black Jack has ingeniously cheated the hangman.
The kid is kidnapped, forced to help the hulking Black Jack flee the city and escape to the country. Young “Tolly” may not be the thug’s conscience. But he finds ways to thwart Jack’s criminal intent, collecting cash for helping push a coach out of the mud when Jack’s first instinct was to clobber and rob the passengers and coachmen.
Their picaresque odyssey takes a turn when Jack contrives a way to ensnare a second coach. A twelve year old girl (Louise Cooper) escapes her trip to a “retreat” (“the madhouse”) and Jack is offered money to track her down. That means the job falls to Tolly.
Tolly finds the girl Belle, and realizes that she might be “savable,” as she’s being shipped off to hide a wealthy family’s “shame” over her (non-hereditary) illness so that her older sister can marry a lord. Tolly becomes her protector as he and Belle tumble into a traveling fair and its “miracle elixir of youth” “doctor” (Packie Byrne) and join their ranks.
But Black Jack still wants the reward for the girl. And a fellow hustler with the fair, Hatch (Andrew Bennett), sees pounds and guineas in the lass and whoever might be looking for her.
The snake-oil pitches to the gullible are one source of chuckles in this dark yet often sentimental “comedy.” But young Hatch’s audacity is Artful Dodging at its best — blackmailing the shady “madhouse” doctor (Russell Waters) who “lost” the mentally disturbed girl from a well-off family, and then blackmailing the child’s father (William Moore) about the family “secret.”
The youngest players have a whiff of “amateur” in their performances. But the supporting cast isn’t entirely made up of unknowns or little knowns. Waters and a few others were veteran character players. And the fair’s troupe of little people dancers — Mike Edminds, Malcolm Dixon and David Rappaport — would soon achieve screen immortality for their hilarious turns in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits.”
Loach’s early career was filled with modestly-budgeted films that punched above their weight, and “Black Jack” is an exemplar of that. It may not be the most original picture on his resume, as that source novel leans a tad too heavily on Dickens to surprise us.
But it’s a lovely immersion in how the other three quarters of Britain lived in the days when “The Empire Silhouette” was what the well-dressed Austen contemporaries aspired to and “poor” wasn’t just a term reserved for English roses with no dowry and limited “prospects.
Rating: R, violence
Cast: Stephen Hirst, Jean Franval, Louise Cooper, Packie Byrne, Joyce Smith, Russell Wallace, William Moore, Pat Wallis, Mike Edmunds, Malcolm Dixon and David Rappaport.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ken Loach, based on a novel by Leon Garfield. A Kestral Films/Cohen Media group release streaming on Tubi, et. al
Running time: 1:44
“Frozen Hot Boys” is a Thai “Cool Runnings,” a cringy goof of a fish-out-of-water comedy about tropical trouble-makers who make a name for themselves in competitive ice and snow sculpting.
Natapohn Tameeruks is Miss Chom, a bored vocational wood-carving teacher at the juvenile prison her mother runs. She’d love to get to Sapporo, Japan. And when one miscreant named Jab (Nuttawat Thanataviepraserth) with a gift for woodcarving shows up among her new “saplings,” ready to be reformed, she sees her chance — competitive ice sculpting.
Chatchai Chinnasri, Sadanont Durongkavarojana, Punnanon Treewonnakil and Piyaphong Dammunee play the rest of the team, characters whom four screenwriters word-processed into stock “types.”
There’s Toom (Dammunee), roly poly enough to consider a career in sumo wrestling, the nerdy assistant Boy (Chinnasri) to Miss Chom whom everybody underestimates, the kid (Durongkavarojana) who knows the prison’s cliques and rules for survival and the hunky, hotheaded kid (Treewonnakil) from a rival clique whom we see — in flashback — stabbing his stepfather to death.
Yes, there are murderers in this crew. And you have to be more than a little drunk to find editing between a kid jabbing a bloody knife into an unseen victim and that same kid turning his stabbing into ice chiseling cute or funny.
The picture adheres to the “Big Contest” comedy formula, but two directors and four screenwriters make little of the comic possibilities of kids who’ve never seen snow experiencing the cold of Winter Olympics host city Sapporo.
Training for the weather in Sapporo by shoving the kids into a refrigerator truck is almost funny.
“Shirts OFF!” in Thai, or dubbed into English is meant to be a laugh line.
Most every character has daddy or step-daddy issues. The picture hints at a possible attraction between the mature-for-his-age Jab and immature for her age Miss Chom, but avoids that trap.
The pollyannaish “Everybody deserves a second chance” and “Let’s carve a PHOENIX” to symbolize that messaging is just weak. The pace of this comedy, a film of near laughs and long interludes before anything else remotely funny happens, is too slack to pass muster outside of Thailand.
Still, the cast is game, which always counts for something. It wasn’t a hard movie to watch, as blandly predictable as it is. But reviewing movies from several Around the World with Netflix cultures is a real chore because of cultural traditions re: movie credits.
“Frozen Hot Boys” doesn’t ID the leads by the characters they play, a simple step in making your homegrown cinema suitable for export.
And breakout Thai star Tony Jaa or his agent had the right idea. Shorten that 10-12 syllable Thai name. No, you don’t have to “Anglicize” it. But a shorter name makes for a punchier brand.
International audiences, and especially movie critics, are going to pull their hair out typing Nuttawat Thanataviepraserth, Sadanont Durongkavarojana et al without a typo.
And if I misidentified an actor playing a character, my apologies. Since the film IDs supporting players with the characters they play, how about paying the leads the same courtesy?
Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity
Cast: Natapohn Tameeruks, Nuttawat Thanataviepraserth, Chatchai Chinnasri, Sadanont Durongkavarojana, Punnanon Treewonnakil and Piyaphong Dammunee
Credits: Directed by Tanakit Kittiapithan and Naruebordee Wechakum, scripted by Rangsima Aukkarawiwat, Tanakit Kittiapithan, Alinda Peerakat and Pruch Neamsri
Mary McDonnell, Tom Skerritt and Auden Thornton also star in this direct-to-streaming modern day Western from the director of “The Signal.”
May 6.
A pointed political parable about the schism that’s caused America’s downfall, a microcosm of hate, violence and decline set in “Eddington,” New Mexico.
“Coming soon?” Sure. But as the fact that it’s set in 2020 makes clear, it’s already here.
They’re celebrating their anniversary and the arrival of their baby. Things go deathly wrong. More than once.
Nick Kroll and Rannells, of “The Prom” and “The Intern,” make it work.
This is one cute looking dark comedy. Look for it June 6.
Chicken Jockey mania continues at the nation’s multiplexes. No. Seriously.
And that is driving “A Minecraft Movie” into the cinematic stratosphere, a runaway hit that should clear $80 million this weekend, when earlier projections had pointed towards a $65 million or so second Fri-Sun.
It’s gamer-friendly eye candy and not much of a movie, but “Minecraft” opened at over $162 million last weekend, so a 50-60% falloff is to be expected. With folks dragging chickens to cinemas and mayhem breaking out over the rarely-seen “Chicken Jockey” game feature, all bets are off. It’s a scene, man.
Jack Black and Jason Momoa have a fresh blockbuster on their resumes, and Jared Hess gets a nice boost to his post-“Napoleon Dynamite” directing career.
In any event, “Minecraft’s” created a “rising tide lifts all boats” phenomenon at the box office.
“The King of Kings,” Angel Studios’ animated cute and kid-friendy Life of Jesus is opening big enough to make the “Chosen” folks jealous. It is on track or an $17.6 million opening weekend, based on Thursday night and Friday’s take. Animation’s higher cost mean that they’ll need to keep packing theaters past Easter in order to have a prayer of breaking even on it, but it’s a good faith-based picture and could have legs.
The heavily-promoted Rami Malek vengeance/spy vehicle “The Amateur” is giving the Oscar winner a hit, with 20th Century Studios cashing in to the tune of $15 million from ticket buyers this weekend. He’s great in it, and there are some good supporting performances bolstering a perfectly watchable if far-fetched thriller.
“Warfare” doesn’t have much star power, much that’s novel or new or much of a story, for that matter, But the Ray Mendoza/Alex Jones day-in-the-life Iraq War combat picture will open at the $8 million mark.
“Drop” is a horrific thriller from the director who made “Happy Death Day” a thing. It’s not enough of a horror film to point to it and note how badly most horror titles have underperformed this year. But “White Lotus” star Meghann Fahy and a cast of lesser names is not proving much of a draw. Tepid entertainment or not, it won’t quote reach $8 (7.5-$7.8) at this rate.
The second half of “The Chosen” series episodes recreating “The Last Supper” will not crack the top five, but a $6-6.5 million “Part 2″opening is found money for that franchise.
One more update coming on this port Sunday afternoon.
Movie Nation 