Movie Nation

The idea behind “Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History” is to take a “Drunk History” run through the lives of Great African Americans — some famous, many unjustly obscure.

They left out the “drunk” part, but the format is the same as “Drunk History” — light sketch comedy takes on Joe Lewis, Robert Johnson, Mae Jemison, Robert Smalls, Josephine Baker, Henry “Box” Brown and others.

Hart recites these tales to his daughter (played by Saniyya Sidney) and her nerdy white friend (Eoghan Thomas Murphy ).

You think you know Black History, from everything you learned in Black History Month? Ever heard of Underground Railroad hero Henry “Box” Brown, who packed escaped slaves, including himself, in shipping crates and mailed them from Richmond to Philly?

How about Robert Smalls, the slave who hijacked a Confederate gunboat in Charleston and took it and other slaves to freedom on it?

Mae Jemison, played by Tiffany Haddish, was the first African American woman astronaut, but who’s heard of Bessie Coleman, a barnstorming pilot in the ’30s who was the first Black woman to obtain a pilot’s license?

Well-known figures like Frederick Douglas, boxer Joe Lewis and bluesman Robert Johnson are addressed as well.

The reenactments aren’t hilarious, or even funny. But they are flippant and kid-friendly.

Hart’s narration? Strictly of the “quick-and-dirty” variety. No, there’s no profanity (well, a Fokker aircraft crack). But his line readings sound like what they are — recitations read from a page. He mispronounces words and nobody on the set had the nerve to ask for another take.

Still, it’s a breezy if not that funny “Sober History” riff through the lives of Great African Americans, such as the inventor of the potato chip, the true “first man to reach the North Pole” (or, um, get close) and others beyond the tiny ranks of “Black History Month’s Greatest Hits,” which is all many of us were taught in school each February.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG.

Cast: Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel Howery, Nika King, Alphonso McAuley , Greg Germann, Christopher Mychael Watson

Credits: Directed by Tom Stern, scripted by Brian Volk-Weiss, Evan White. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:17

“Horse Girl” is a candy-colored descent into madness, a lightweight drama that maintains something like suspense as we cringe through a woman’s struggle to just maintain the appearance of “normality” and “sanity.”

Alison Brie of dark comedies such as “The Disaster Artist” and “The Little Hours” co-wrote and stars in this character study in loneliness, sadness and a growing disconnection with reality.

The innocuous title doesn’t give away what a sugar-coated but downbeat movie this is. In the words of the late Vic Ferrari, “Whoa. Hard to get happy after THAT one.”

Brie plays Sarah, a gawky, awkward but cute clerk at the fabric and hobby store, smiling and chatting away her days with her colleagues and her boss (Molly Shannon).

When we see her later at the stables, instructing a wealthy teen in horseback riding, we figure that’s just her side hustle. It’s her birthday, so maybe some other folks from her Zumba class will join her for drinks.

She’s got a roommate, Nikki (Debby Ryan) who has a boyfriend who has a roommate Nikki would like to hook Sarah up with. Nikki even gives her a makeover when the guy (John Reynolds) comes off for drinks — “Show off your body. You never do that!”

All is normal, right down to the conservative late model Volvo Sarah drives around town.

But at home, she sleepwalks. She has nosebleeds. She zones out at traffic lights.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember!”

She’s absorbed with this supernatural crime drama, “Purgatory,” which features diabolical alien cloning and an intrepid cop (Robin Tunney) out to foil their evil plans.

And she has disturbing dreams, of lying on a white floor alongside strangers, portals of piercing light. Searching the Internet for answers to what ails her serves up plausible solutions, and “alien abduction.”

That’s when she sees a stranger (John Ortiz) from her dreams, a plumbing contractor. That’s when we start to fear for Sarah, worrying that her grip on reality is — like her car — something she will misplace or forget.

That’s when we notice how the other folks at the stables (Toby Huss) regard her warily. There’s a sense of indulgence in the roomie, whose patience is wearing thin, in her kindly boss and in Gary (Paul Reiser), who turns out to be her one-time step-dad.

There’s backstory and “history” coming, and it won’t be happy go lucky.

Brie lays it all out there for this film, struggling to take us inside Sarah’s madness. She has pleasant, sentient moments and manages to clumsily flirt and carry on normal conversations –embellished with tiny fibs and white lies.

Sarah is carrying some heavy secrets.

The tension Brie builds into this character — that Kristen Wiig vulnerability teetering on the edge of pathos thing — and into the story isn’t something easily achieved. “Horse Girl” takes on a dread that grows more disquieting as the movie meanders on.

But that meandering is a problem, the bubbly surface to the character stands out more than the alarm, panic at what she doesn’t understand and more importantly doesn’t remember.

“Horse Girl” makes a nice showcase for a writer/actress with range and fearlessness. It’s just that — dread aside — the film feels lightweight and frothy, first scene to last. She’s put her all into a character that keeps us at arm’s length and a movie that’s not serious enough for its subject — mental illness.

MPAA Rating: R (for language and some sexuality, graphic nudity and drug use)

Cast: Alison Brie, Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, John Reynolds, John Ortiz and Paul Reiser

Credits: Directed by Jeff Baena, script by Jeff Baena and Alison Brie. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s a female centric R-rated comic book thriller directed by a Sundance winner.

And it has been hyped to the moon and back, with Warners feelings it DC muscle after “Aquaman” and “Joker.”

Fangirls have to show up. Will the fanboys join them?

Thursday night’s previews of “Birds of Prey” cleared only $4 million, a fraction of what we can expect from your typical comic book film, even the R-rated ones. That’s less than “Shazam,” which pulled in $5.9 not that long ago.

It is fan friendly, although praise has been muted. Check the Metacritic rating, not Rottentomatoes, for confirmation of that. Take away Margot Robbie and there is not much here to latch onto.

Insanely violent. Leave the kids at home.

Exhibitor Relations is saying $60 million this weekend is within reach, Variety guessing $50 and Warners $45.

Saner heads suggest a $40-50 million weekend for the opening, right on the bottom edge of “healthy.” And will it have “Wonder Woman” legs?

Anything below $40 and you’re allowed to whisper “bomb.”

This looks a lot more like fans are leery of that “Suicide Squad” hangover, even if the pandering pileup on Rottentomatoes doesn’t share that justifiable skepticism.

In any event, it will own a weekend or two in February and fans will probably get it into the black. But maybe not.

Warners needs to find funnier script doctors and directors with a little more experience and clout and feel for the genre.

The fights and the violence and the gloom are here, but the wit and spark of life? Not so much.

https://deadline.com/2020/02/birds-of-prey-weekend-box-office-margot-robbie-1202853768/

Will F., taking on a wee bit of Irish brogue just to fit in, y’see, stars in this comedy about ghosts, Satanic rites and a washed-up rock star (Will) who makes his pact with the you know who to come back from “show business death.”
Mar. 6 we see it.

It seems like only yesterday that I was rolling my eyes at a faith-based “comedy” that surrounded its no-name/unfunny stars with famous actors from the big and small screen.

OK, it WAS only yesterday. And here we go again, another movie with “faith” in the title, the odd sprightly turn by big names brought in for small supporting roles, a clever line here and there and the germ of an idea.

And if there’s barely a laugh in “Faith Ba$ed,” it can’t come as much consolation that there aren’t many in most Christian films, including“Faith, Hope & Love.”

At least“Assassin 33 A.D.” was funny — if unintentionally so.

“Faith Ba$ed” is a send-up of faith-based films, scripted by a preacher’s son, directed by a Christian. Co-writer and star Luke Barnett has concocted a stoner comedy where the stoners cynically figure the way to break into the movie biz is by making a church-financed movie with faith and belief as its subject and subtext.

The stoners are Luke (Barnett) and Tanner (Tanner Thomason), two dead-enders in Reseda, California who come to the conclusion “It’s time we DID something with our lives!”

Luke just lost his job cleaning pools (Danny Woodburn, “Mickey” in “Seinfeld,” plays his boss). His side hustle is a “miracle tea” pyramid scheme promoted by his idol, ex-con/millionaire Nicky Steele (Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld”).

Tanner’s a bartender and a womanizer who uses “Schindler’s List” to get his lady-loves in the mood.

The guys have been pals since childhood, long-obsessed with the TV and film work of “Rambo” impersonator Butch Savage (David Koechner of “Anchorman”). This wild scheme sounds like merely their latest wild scheme.

But as Luke’s stepdad is a pastor (the wonderful Lance Reddick) who is about to lose his church, he figures he can start a new career and make enough cash to save the church and impress his Dad. Besides, his father’s noticed how some churches (such as Sherwood Baptist, in Georgia) have gotten into the film business for proselytizing and profit. He inadvertently gave them the idea.

“Fireproof,” “God’s Not Dead,” “War Room,” “Courageous” — all are cited as inspiringly profitable ventures in the faith-based film field. And there  are jokes about who these films line up as “stars” — Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo. Hilarious.

Here’s the only scene in the film with real satiric sting. The guys take a meeting with the equally-cynical head of acquisitions (Margaret Cho) of “ChristFlix,” a play on Pureflix, a faith-based distributor. And the foul-mouthed studio hack has the magic formula for their movie.

Number one, “You need an A, B or C-list celebrity who is also a Christian. Or at the very least, a Republican.” Number two, put “key words in the title — faith, prayer, heaven, Huckabee…” Number three, add “peril” and number four, “You’ve got to talk about God — JC. Bonus points if God is IN it!”

The lads, newly resolute, set out to learn the film business, come up with a concept (“A Prayer in Space,” because “You never heard a prayer in ‘Alien!'” ) and learn about fund-raising, casting, green screens, post production, the works.

All of which has been covered in other films, funnier films without the whole “faith-based” hook. The DIY casting and filmmaking scenes haven’t got one decent sight gag.

The obstacles, potential romances and rifts between the two best friends that get in their way are desultory and haphazardly injected into the proceedings. And the leads? If only this description rang the least bit true.

“If this was ‘Dumb & Dumber,’ Tanner would be ‘Dumb’ and Luke would DEFINITELY be ‘Dumber!'”

It’s not. A bigger problem with this comedy of bong-hits and profanity is one of tone. The actual movie in between those anti-faith-based film moments — one of the reasons the picture generated controversy before they ever rolled camera — is mild-mannered and bland — in the extreme.

That’s right. This “cynical” comedy isn’t the least bit cynical, and certainly not cynical enough. Remember “Saved” with Mandy Moore? That’s your touchstone.

If you’re a preacher’s kid making a movie about getting Christian “suckers” to finance your new movie venture, there is no pulling punches. Go big, ridiculing the whole “There’s a sucker born every minute” mockery of Christianity, play up who you’re hustling and why you think you can hustle them, or don’t bother.

Reddick and Alexander acquit themselves, as can be expected. Koechner’s performance is a series of over-the-top inserts that don’t deliver. And nobody else so much as registers.

It’s so dull and flat that maybe the producers’ best bet is starting a campaign for Fox viewers to buy it and shelve it to prevent “this blasphemy” from spreading. But I just ruined that scheme, didn’t I?

As a “faith-based” film spoof, this one is basically a 90 minute swing-and-a-miss.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, pot and alcohol abuse

Cast: Luke Barnett, Tanner Thomason, Margaret Cho, Danielle Nicolet, Jason Alexander, Carly Craig, Danny Woodburn, David Koechner and Lance Reddick.

Credits: Directed by Vincent Masciale, script by Luke Barnett. A Lone Suspect release.

Running time: 1:32

Not talking about James Earl Jones or Billy Dee Williams, here.

No, this is the marketing whiz who figured out how to market the quirky, pricey Fox release so that it would dominate the summer of ’77.

Ashley Boone was his name.

He went on to run the studio after Alan Ladd was chased out, the first African American Hollywood studio chief, and find glory marketing box office phenomena like “Chariots of Fire” and “Thelma & Louise.”

Here’s a nice Hollywood Reporter remembrance of the brains behind polishing the little that George Lucas wrote and directed into a global blockbuster, brand and “universe.”

VERDICT, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Newman, Sidney Lumet, 1982, directing the actors

“Network” is one of those movies that I cannot channel surf past without stopping. If I’m lucky, I catch it from the very beginning because like all movies, it casts its spell in the opening moments, this one more than most.

I stumbled across it again the other night just as I was finishing the chapter on filming it in “Sidney Lumet: A Life,” Maura Spiegel’s new biography of this almost peerless “actor’s director,” one of the biggest names behind the camera in the ’60s on into the ’80s.

There aren’t a lot of filmmakers in the know who wouldn’t give their eye teeth to call Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” his last film, made when he was 83, their own. Going out on a high note. Not many get to pull that off.

He was a child actor on Broadway, making one film appearance in the 1930s, a struggling young stage director lured by Yul Brynner to dive into the then-budding medium of television, where he quickly made his mark.

Smart, a WWII vet whose assignment was teaching others how to use and field-repair the most complicated technology of its day — radar — and organized — he became famous for making live TV complicated and cinematically artful during the first “Golden Age of Television.”

He dropped into film with the minimalist classic “Twelve Angry Men” where those organizational skills and that acting background made him famous for generating Oscar-nominated performances and movies that always came in under budget — “The Pawnbroker,” The Anderson Tapes,” “Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” “The Hill.”

Spiegel had access to two invaluable resources when putting together “A Life” — Lumet’s definitive (for its day) “how to make a movie” manual, “Making Movies” (1995), Lumet’s unfinished and abandoned autobiography, and the memoirs of his womanizing father, Baruch, a Polish emigre and mainstay of New York’s Yiddish theater after coming to America.

Spiegel, a New York film academic, gets a little carried away with the post-mortem psychoanalysis of her subject, gets WAY off topic here and there, and seems a tad out of her comfort zone talking about early TV and how it worked.

But she never goes far wrong when leaning on Lumet’s own memories, the sometimes revealing interviews he gave over the decades and the “opening up” he almost did in the book he never finished.

And there are just enough anecdotes from the movies he made, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s empassioned pursuit of him to direct “Network,” and Lumet’s care in grooming Beatrice Strait’s one big scene in that movie — nine takes (Lumet rarely did more than a couple) that enshrined her supporting actress performance as the shortest (on screen) Oscar winning performance in Oscar history.

His own acting history is little-known except by film buffs, and his various marriages (once, to Anderson Cooper’s mama, Gloria Vanderbilt) were not something I’d ever heard much about. His child-actor childhood wasn’t idyllic, his war experiences traumatic (even though he never saw combat) and his reputation as a New York Filmmaker never as great as Scorsese’s or Woody Allen’s.

Blame Pauline Kael for that. A major New York critic who guts your every movie with a review could ding a reputation, back in the day.

But the movies, with their spare artistry, intricate but never flashy compositions and career-defining performances, speak for themselves.

And Spiegel, breaking the highlights down, does a pretty good job of speaking up for them as well.

Sidney Lumet: A Life. St. Martin’s Press, 401 pages. $29.99.

When “street fashion” photographer Bill Cunningham died in 2016, he was New York Famous for being the photographer who documented what the stylish wore on the city’s streets, for decades, for The New York Times.

He’d been honored in Paris for his contributions to fashion photography (he also shot runway shows) and celebrated in a lovely and popular documentary, “Bill Cunningham: New York,” in 2011.

People in the wider world knew who he was thanks to many TV profiles that spun out of that film, and the legions of fans and peers from his “world” that sang his praises in the movie.

“We all got dressed for Bill,” Vogue editor and fashion influencer Anna Wintour famously intoned.

But filmmaker Mark Bozek was sitting on a long filmed interview he had with Cunningham before that “fame” came his way, before he’d been profiled and interviewed to death, before AIDS retreated from the obituary pages, where it had decimated Cunningham’s world and taken so many he knew and worked with.

And that 1994 interview paints an even more revealing, more intimate portrait in “The Times of Cunningham” than the more authoritative earlier documentary. This is the famed street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham at his lightly-guarded, offhand, charming and modest best, telling his life story, having the various now-obscure figures who made him who he was today defined and described by a narrator — Sarah Jessica Parker.

Here is Cunningham, at 65, sitting with Bozek, cinematographer Jeff Hodges and sound recordist Bob Rodriguez, open and smiling and charming, still a wide-eyed enthusiast, a man at the peak of our current expression — “Living his best life.”

“I just go out and enjoy myself with the camera,” he gushes. “I don’t think of it as work!”

“I’m not a real photographer,” he corrects his off-camera interviewer (Bozek). “I’m a fashion historian.”

He grew up a Boston postal worker’s son who always had an eye for fashion and a thing for hats. His early years had him working as a milliner —  a hat maker — selling his wares as “William J.” while supposedly working in the advertising department of Bonwit Teller.

He made hats in his spare time in the Army — “I kept that quiet, you bet!” — and took weekend passes to dash off to Paris to see fashion shows. His long journey towards his eventual life’s work let him see that “I wasn’t getting the answers from the fashion shows…I wanted to see the way women dress in their own lives…how people dress every day,” what they put on and accessorize with before hitting the streets of New York or Paris.

He’d ride his bike, dismounting to snap a shot or two, marveling at so much he saw.

He had jobs with Women’s Wear Daily and later freelanced for The New York Times, always living simply in a small apartment (eventually in the Carnegie Hall Towers), wearing a French laborer’s blue coveralls as a uniform, never getting health insurance, quietly earning, saving and giving away MILLIONS as he did.

The first camera Cunningham was given — an Olympus Pen half-frame (half a full frame of film exposed for each photo — came with an edict. “Use it as a notebook.” And that’s what he did.

He gets emotional in the interview about his “charmed life,” the sadness of AIDS devastating the communities he held dear. And he kept working. The night “Bill Cunningham: New York” premiered, he hung out outside, snapping the fashionable folks going in to see it. He never saw the film himself.

But as the “Nostradamus of fashion” (from Bozek’s written narration performed by “Sex and the City” star Parker), he had a higher calling.

“He helped people ‘see’ in a new way.”

Indeed he did. And “The Times of Bill Cunningham” helps us see him in a new way.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill Cunningham, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Bozek.  A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:14

The horror of a boat trip to Hell. Oh yes.

“Dead Sound”comes to theaters/streaming March 3.

I interviewed Benh Z. when his Oscar-nominated indie marvel, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” came out. That was eight years ago.

He obviously has a knack for working with kids, and an interest in telling stories with a child’s eye view, looking at even a decayed, impoverished landscape with wonder.

Aside from “What about ‘Wendy,'” his “Southern Wild” take on “Peter Pan,” took seven years (he announced it in 2013), what other questions can you think to ask him?

Comment below and thanks, as always, for the help.