Movie Nation

In her forty years on the screen, nobody has been better at “making it real” than Alfre Woodard. 

So don’t drop in on “Clemency” expecting histrionics. She plays a prison warden at a penitentiary with a crowded Death Row, and a busy execution schedule. And Bernadine Williams knows she’s got to keep her game face on.

Bernadine is sublimating the media and protesters outside her gate stress, the agonizing moral dilemma of this work and the politics of her job. Woodard gets everything we need to know about her across in just her gaze, her eyes.

In Woodard’s stillness is a singularly great performance from a career decorated with them.

We meet her on one of those execution days, maintaining professionalism, not giving away much in the way of bother at the “What do we want?” “RESPECT FOR LIFE!” “When do we want it?” “Here and NOW!” shouts outside. Bernadine maintains her decorum with the mother of the condemned.

“Did they stop it? Have you heard anything?”

She’s in the death chamber for the lethal injection. And she never lets those with the grim task of witnessing the execution see her sweat — even when the procedure goes wrong.

“I could try his foot,” the tech says, searching for a vein that will take the needle. “We could try his femoral artery.”

“Do it.” 

She keeps the media at bay, is rigid about protocol and process. She may be a functionary, a cog in the machine following orders, always professional, never offering an opinion or showing signs of conscience.

But Bernadine can’t sleep. She’s drifted away from her still-trying husband (Wendell Pierce). She’s drinking at a local bar, right to the edge of sloppy drunk.

And there is no break in sight. Here comes the next condemned man. There were problems with Tony’s (Aldis Hodge) conviction, appeals worth hearing. If ever there was a case for clemency, his activist lawyer (Richard Schiff, perfectly cast) says this is it.

But the lawyer has little hope. The politics of the death penalty in red state America make it as untouchable as Social Security. The idea, he grouses, is to “kill them as under the radar as you can.” 

Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu (“alaskaLand” is her other feature credit) doesn’t have an emotionally wrenching story of the “Dead Man Walking” variety to tell here. She may not even have the most emotional Death Row story of this winter (“Just Mercy” is due out shortly).

But she loses herself on the details and lets her Best Actress to Never Win an Oscar star walk us through them.  Woodard’s Bernadine knows her lines, her “when it’s time for the procedure” interview with the condemned. She has the long names of the drug combo that is supposed to numb and then kill the inmate memorized.

The fireworks at home are muted, insensate. She cannot lose her temper. Not any more. Her debate with the retiring activist lawyer is measured, political and self-preserving.

“You want to play this ‘good guys/bad guys.'” She knows, to him, “I’m one of the bad guys.”

“Clemency” has just enough debate about the morality of the death penalty, just enough compassion for the condemned and pays enough notice to the family of the crime victim to fit within the genre whose conventions it leans on. It won’t change anybody’s mind, and probably won’t play at all in the states where revenge killing by the state is most popular.

But Woodard lifts it, suggests the human cost, the humanity one has to dull to endure this process, time and again. Her performance is reason enough to seek out “Clemency,” and make you realize that it’s not just the condemned who need it.

MPAA Rating:  R for some disturbing material, and language.

Cast: Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Wendell Pierce, and Stephen Schiff

Credits: Written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:53

Estimates on the opening weekend take of a middling “Jumanji” sequel were in the $40-$44 million range, and appear to be on the low side. If Saturday is anything like Thursday night and Friday, it could hit $50 million.

The weary horror title “Black Christmas,” so controversial when the first version came out in the ’70s, re-engineered as a female revenge fantasy this time out, is doing less that half the business expected of it. $5, maybe $6.

I saw it with a big late night crowd, an they were as dead as the sorority girls slaughtered on screen. Very badly written and directed. It doesn’t connect. Word of mouth is killing it.

Same with Clint Eastwood’s bastardized right wing biased “Richard Jewell” bio pic. Maybe $6 million tickets sold.

Clint’s demo is ancient, and without an action hook (“American Sniper”) or comic twist (“The Mule”) his movies just don’t cross over, play in the heartland or draw in the big cities.

Warners wasted it’s money and wade into controversy for nothing. Time to take away angry old great grandpa’s car keys.

https://deadline.com/2019/12/jumanji-the-next-level-richard-jewell-black-christmas-opening-weekend-box-office-1202808689/

Saturday mornings are the most popular time to preview upcoming kid films. Studios like to pack a theater with kids, their parents and film reviewers so that those of us writing about movie get a taste of how it plays with its intended audience.

So today it’s Blue Sky animation’s “Spies in Disguise,” a Fox release.

All star voice cast, an action comedy staring Will Smith, Rashida Jones, Reba McIntyre, Tom Holland and Karen Gillan from “Jumanji.”

Not sure how long Disney, which now owns Fox, will keep this animation arrangement intact. Blue Sky has made some fun films, but rarely on a par with Disney Animation or Pixar’s best. Rarely blockbusters.

“Spies” looks as if it could work and opens Christmas Day.

The newspaper treated as the villain in Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray’s warped, wingnut friendly movie, was no such thing. They were the first to report the fact that he could not have done it.

Go to the link if you want to see how.

https://www.ajc.com/news/local/torpy-large-ajc-wronged-richard-jewell-wow-what-you-don-know/ucwRJ1RSxzBDwA6gNV7pQK/

Quick show of hands, who among you got through “6 Underground,” I mean ALL the way through it?

Because I was ready to give up, ten minutes in. I may be a big Ryan Reynolds fan, but even I have my limits.

‘Absolute s–tshow,” as one wag in the cast declares.

And everybody knows, NOBODY stages a s—tshow like Michael Bay.

Bay goes so over-the-top for this $150 million action extravaganza, it’s like he’s making a parody of his entire career — mercifully “Transformer” free.

The opening gambit lays it all out here for us, the Bay trademarks stuffed into a car chase that goes on and on and on and…

It’s Alfas and Rollers, Ferraris and Beemers, Minis and megayachts, thousand dollar sunglasses and 20-grand suits, exotic locales and exotic underwear, supermodel hookers and Cover Girl secret agents in male wish-fulfillment fantasy sex scenes.

All of it cut into a blur of explosions, crashes, blood-bursts, heads exploding, bullets raining and all of it set to pop and rock music — a montage of mayhem and Muzak.

One-liners, some whispered, most shouted – “Never underestimate the power of a really nice suit.” “This is where you ask me if I’m afraid!” “Evil goes unpunished.”

That’s the premise, Reynolds as a billionaire inventor and adrenalin junky who pulls  together this “team” to see to it that the world’s a bit nicer without certain villainous humans in it. His “family” is a group of specialists with numbers, not names — “2 — C.I.A. Spook,” “3 — The Hitman.”

They fake their deaths (elaborately) and become “ghosts,” because “ghosts have one power above all others — to haunt the living, for what they’ve done.”

Dave Franco’s the driver in that excessive, glib and gory opening chase. Melanie Laurent is the “spook” having a bullet taken out of her by Adria Arjona in the backseat.  I forget her number.

Ben Hardy is “The Skywalker,” a parkour-practicing thief, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is the hitman, Corey Hawkins is the ex-military sniper recruited for The Big Mission.

That would be taking out a Middle Eastern dictator and yadda yadda yadda, who cares?

If you’re into Michael Bay, this is on a par with his lesser action comedies, even though Reynolds brought his “Deadpool” writers with him to the party.

He owes them. And you know what? That favor’s been REPAID, with a really crappy not-that-flip-and-funny screenplay.

“There is NOTHING else I’d rather be doing with my life!”

If you’re not into Bay, fast forward to the BIG STUNT/EFFECT in the final act if you’re not going to sit through the whole thing. It’s a doozy, more impressive than anything I can remember in a Michael Bay movie.

It took a lot to get through this, because I re-HEEEL-ly hated that stupid, talky, bloody and endless opening chase. I’ll cut it a teensy bit of slack for A) Ryan Reynolds and B) that really cool effect at the end.

But that’s it. Done with this. Unless it becomes a damned franchise.

Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout, bloody images and some sexual content.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melanie Laurent, Dave Franco

Credits: Directed by Michael Bay, script by Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 2:08

Breathtakingly beautiful, poetic, soulful and chillingly topical, Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Place” searches for righteousness in a time when cruelty and evil are the popular will.

This dream fugue of a movie is three hour meditation on the bravery of conscientously objecting to the actions of one’s government and refusing to swear fealty to a leader when to do so would be a betrayal of yourself and your morality.

It’s a World War II allegory for our times, a lone Austrian refusing to “go along,” to “Heil Hitler” even though every Austrian around him insists on it. And it’s a love story, an all-consuming romance that cannot withstand the test that this moral choice forces Franz Jägerstätter to make.

Franz, played by August Diehl of “The Command” and “Allied” and “Inglourious Basterds,” is an Alpine farmer who, with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) has made a life in in their village, Radegund. It’s a gorgeous place, a world peopled by those content with lives of physical labor ruled only by the demands of each changing season.

They plow and plant, care for the cows, chickens and pigs, scythe the wheat in late summer and haul it to the waterwheel grist mill with their donkey.

Malick presents Radegund as a quiet pastoral idyll, living in harmony with nature, all but untouched by the modern world.

But it’s 1939. Hitler, we remember, has annexed his native Austria into the German Reich. And Austrians, especially the village mayor (Karl Markovics), are thrilled. He’s “broken our chains” “lifted the people” and made Austria great again.

Franz and Fani pay little mind to the beer-swilling pundits of village green. They’re too consumed with each other, their little girls and their work to pay it much mind. Then, the Reich invades Poland. And then Franz is drafted.

He details the training at a nearby ancient fortress in long, loving letters home. But as the recruits are indoctrinated by triumphalist documentary footage of the senseless, dehumanizing slaughter their cruel, amoral state and its twisted leader impose on Europe, Franz has attacks of conscience.

Fortunately, he’s sent home after training. But he’s made up his mind. He will not swear loyalty to this monster. He will not take part in this amoral horror. As France collapses, Fani, Franz and others in the village hope that the war is over and he won’t face the choice he’s already made his mind up about.

We know better.

I shrugged off Malick after the swooning, indulgent sentimentality of “Tree of Life.” His recent films “Song of Songs,” “Knight of Cups” and “To the Wonder” left me cold. But “A Hidden Place” is closer to the mark, a film that marries his style — dreamy, immersive images of nature and natural beauty — to a subject that suits it.

This is his most beautiful film since “A New World,” his most poetic since “The Thin Red Line.” “A Hidden Place” is a reminder that nobody’s movies are as pretty to look at as Malick’s. And that beauty is a vivid underpinning to the picture’s over-arching message.

How could anyone this attuned to this world possibly go along with the unnatural destruction, inhuman cruelty and slaughter of a state that has gone mad, led by hate-mongering demagogue?

The camera roams and hovers, hanging on the shoulders of characters — on a farm field, on a country lane, in a training facility or later, in a prison — as we hear and see snippets of conversation. Too much of it is in voice over, a Malick crutch. A lot of is couched in the language of soul-searching profundity.

“Don’t they know evil when they see it?”

“The whole world’s sick.”

“Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

“You can’t change the world. The world’s stronger.”

“No evil can happen to a good man.”

Fani is the more devout of the two, not puzzling over Franz’s choice, having the faith that God will intervene on the side of the righteous, trying to be resolute in the face of the awful consequences everybody involved knows are coming.

An interesting stylistic touch — voices are never raised as Franz and Fani debate and discuss this, and then involve a few neighbors of the same mind, and even the village priest. Faith is extolled and tested, but even The Catholic Church wants him to do what it does — just go along to get along, ride this whole Hitler thing out.

Once Franz’s decision becomes public, though, tempers flare, voices rise, shunning sets in and threats begin.

Dealing with military authority and The State has an altogether different tone. Most of the dialogue, save for the odd unsympathetic villager, is performed in English. German, in this film, is the language of authority, hate and cruelty.

We need only that moment Franz declines, in uniform, to swear an oath to Adolf to know what’s coming. If we’ve learned nothing else from World War II movies, it’s that sadism and savagery are best delivered in German.

And if America’s current political plight has taught us nothing else, it’s that resorting to violence is easier after we’ve become numb to the language of violence.

The performances are sympathetic, but for all the close-ups and efforts at absorbing us into these lives in this world, the characters remain remote, removed. There’s warmth but nothing that approached emotionally wrenching.

Malick, of course, takes his time getting us to this point. He’s an indulgent filmmaker, and as much as I appreciate the meditative rhythms of story, inner conflict, setting and consequences here, “A Hidden Life” is slow to the point of slack.

The picture’s so long it buries nice cameos by Matthias Schoenaerts, as a lawyer who calls this protest “madness” that “no one outside of this prison” will ever hear of, and the great German actor Bruno Ganz, famed for “Downfall” and a million Internet “Hitler” speech memes. Ganz plays an aged officer who sits in judgment of Franz’s “treason” to The Leader and his regime.

Still, it’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material including violent images.

Cast: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon, Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruno Ganz.

Credits: Written and directed by Terrance Malick. A Fox Searchlight release.’

Running time: 2:54

Love just LOVE that Imogen Poots. Even if there is no way that line will ever NOT be funny.

An actress who has made interesting choices ever since “V for Vendetta,” “Me and Orson Welles” and “28 Weeks Later” put her on the cinematic radar, the Great Brit uses her one last turn as a college coed to do a “statement” movie on horror and its incurable, genre-old desire to slaughter pretty young things like herself.

“Black Christmas” has a female empowerment “woke/revenge” subtext, making it a slap in the face to the “torture porn” decade of horror. Sorority girls, hunted on a college campus where this sort of thing may have been going on through time immemorial, turn the tables on their tormentors.

Great.

If only they’d get around to that a tad earlier. But no, we’ve got to have an hour of summary slaughter, a collection of the dullest, least sympathetic and most poorly set-up murders in the history of Dead Teenager Movies.

There’s time for a little cheesecake, the ladies of “Moo Kappa” dressing in Santa’s Little Helper mini-dresses to tease, taunt and blast a little truth-to-power to the jerks at “Deek,” Delta Kappa Epsilon. One suspects student activist Kris (Aleyse Shannon) is behind it. But Riley (Poots) is shoved into the skirt and into service as well.

Riley has history with the bro-iest of the frat bro fraternities. Riley accused the former president of the frat of attempting to roofie and rape her. Riley reported this and “nobody believed you.”

And now that she’s dissed them to their smug faces, that frat is going to be out for revenge.

And then there’s this professor and Hawthorne U. alumnus who teaches “the classics” to the student body, and “there’s a petition circulating to have me fired” for it. He’s played by “Princess Bride” and “Saw” vet Cary Elwes.

SOMEbody is already sending out boringly-threatening text messages supposedly from the “founder” of the college and its most infamous fraternity. As the school is 200 years old, you could see why the kids wouldn’t take that seriously.

But this texter or texters is stalking women while wearing a Grim Reaper cowl and mask, making text jokes about what a ham and a sorority girl have in common — “They both SQUEAL before they die!” Take heed, ladies. Something horrific is going down.

Or would be if “Black Christmas” wasn’t the worst-directed horror movie in recent memory. There is no suspense, no time allowed to summon up terror, no novelty to the killings. And those elements I mentioned that “set up” the story? They make for the most excruciatingly dull first hour, and nothing that follows can atone for that.

An icicle? Christmas tree lights? Seems to me those might have turned up in the seven earlier incarnations of this horror title.

Poots gamely tries to bring a little acting polish to a genre where perfect hair, smiles and cleavage have always been the priorities.
But actress-turned-director Sophia Takal, who co-wrote the script, cannot for the life of her figure out what’s scary and what isn’t. There isn’t a second of suspense in this, not one sorority bonding or sorority sisters bickering moment is believable.

The picture begins badly, attempting a tone-setting menstrual pad gag scene early on, a “diva cup” moment that falls so wincingly flat that you hope the actress who performs it doesn’t let her parents see it.

Yes, date rape is horrific. Not the worst idea to motivate a vengeance fantasy with. But somebody somewhere should have had a clue, early on, that there’s more to a horror film than saying how “woke” you’re being. Somebody should have seen this wasn’t scary and was never going to be scary without rewrites and a director with a feel for the medium, who realizes how to make murders chilling, horrific and empathetic.

When things go this wrong, even having Imogen Poots can’t save it.

Still funny, BTW.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, thematic content involving sexual assault, language, sexual material and drinking
Cast: Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue and Cary Elwes.

Credits: Directed by Sophia Takal, script by Sophia Takal and April Wolfe. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

No news flash there, right?

A blockbuster sequel that adds more demographics to its star power, set to dominate the last free weekend before “Star Wars” eats Christmas.

I wasn’t nuts about”Jumanji: The Next Level.” Adding Danny Glover and Dann DeVito offered a cute twist to the performances of Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson. Or could have.

Maybe grandparents will take the grandkids and that’ll pay off.

Bringing in Awkwafina adds little in the way of laughs. Will her fans show up?

Box office Mojo is saying “Next Level” will open at $45. I don’t know about that.

Big crowd at the late night showing of “Black Christmas.” Kids and their horror films. Will it manage a decent take somewhere in the $teens? Not likey, but maybe. Over $10, anyway.

Review coming shortly.

That puts it in a fight for third with “Richard Jewell,” Clint Eastwood’s latest. Will Fox News be able to get the Kool Ade Clint crowd of white seniors into theaters? It is predicted to earn $11 million and do long term damage to Olivia Wilde’s reputation.

“Frozen 2” will take second place, with nothing to challenge it in that Movies for Little Kids corner of the market.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed3228566532/?ref_=bo_hm_hp

It’s a mess. And Brendan Fraser stars in it. Eventually.

It takes a good, long while for Fraser, of late on the Hollywood “comeback trail” thanks to TV work in “The Affair” and “Trust,” to show up in the feature writing-directing debut of Rohit Karn Batra.

“Line of Descent” is a New Dehli crime family saga where rival siblings debate whether or not to “go legit” and abandon their “land mafia” business, or get into something else illegal. Gun running is an option, and that’s where Fraser’s sociopathic stoner Charu comes in. Eventually. He’s an Alaska native who listens to the sound of a round being chambered and declares, “That is gooooood metal. YEAH it is!”

But we’ve got to wait an hour before he arrives, hearing the patriarch of the Sinha mob family (Prem Chopra) gripe about the “pimps” and “dirty whores” all these “foreigners” who have flooded India are. He is soul-searching for a way to get out of the family business.

“Land mafia” is almost exactly what it sounds like. A developer covets a piece of urban real estate. Thugs, some of them cleaned up and reasonable-sounding, strong-arm the assorted home-owners to sell out…or else!

Old Man Sinha has remorse for this business, and fear that cops are closing in and the whole shooting match is about to fall in on them. “I want to die in peace,” he says, (in Hindi with English subtitles). “I am not s good man!”

He’s got three sons — the tough yet businesslike Prithvi (Ronit Roy), the thuggish and impulsive Siddharth (Neeraj Kabi) and the fey pretty boy son of the old man’s last, much younger wife, stepson Suraj (Ali Haji).  Succesion could be tricky.

As indeed it is, when the old man offs himself. A power struggle ensues.

Then there’s the cop (Abhay Deol) who has just moved to town, who is looking at adoption with his wife so that they can ensure their “Line of Descent.”

Random bar attacks, strategic assaults and schemes and counter-schemes to carry out hits, maybe pretending there’s a mob war going on, flesh out the film, and slow it down to a crawl. The brothers plot, form alliances and plot again.

And eventually, the charismatic Westerner/gun runner shows up reveling in “the stench that is our business” (the smell of dirty money) and hijacks the picture, such as it is.

Batra, as a first-time director, has a hard time distinguishing between what stories are important and what to trim. He can’t figure out, at times, that every minute detail of resaurant scenes does NOT need to show us a waiter being scolded to get to an assigned table. Random shots, almost random characters and inane dialogue abound.

Those lines, crafted in an “English was not the first language I learned” goofiness, can prompt head-scratching.

“You must navigate to the genesis that is Barat (the patriarch),” the cop is told. Barat’s the villain who “slowly architected the ‘land mafia.'”

Somebody “stabbed him in the heart with a steak knife!” Wait, there are steak knives in India, now? Stupor mundi. 

There is no point in having the adoption counselor intone “Every child deserves a good home,” nor is the police motto completely necessary for us to hear. “Your job is doing your duty. And your duty is doing what is right.”

The sturdy Indian cast do their best with this plodding material. But Fraser, on a busman’s holiday of sorts, is the one who vamps it up and seems to have the most fun with it. He affects a curious accent, brings a lot of energy to his scenes as Charu (Charlie, to Indian ears? Maybe?) seems to be playing one side against the other and is most impressed by the too-young/too-weak youngest brother.

“I am inspired by your bear-like confidence!”

It’s probably not fair, hiring an American, billing him high, and throwing a couple of unknown-in-the-west leads in there for nearly an hour of movie before “The Hollywood Star” shows up. But “Line of Descent” has balance issues, threads that it loses track of (the cop is second billed, I think, and utterly unnecessary).

It’s misshapen and clumsy, start to finish.  But at least SOMEbody got to travel a little and wear funny hair-dye, an odd accent and eye makeup in a foreign land.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Ronit Roy, Abhay Deol, Neeraj Kabi, Charlotte Poutrel, Anisha Victor and Brendan Fraser.

Credits: Written and directed by Rohit Karn Batra.  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:44

A big 2020 release of a 2008 musical.