Movie Nation

What’d the ol’ball coach tell us? All the ol’ball coaches?

“Play through the whistle,” he’d say. “Play through ‘The Last Whistle.’”

“The Last Whistle” is a lukewarm Texas melodrama that lets your parse that phrase and ethos. Exert yourself to the maximum, even past the point where the referee has blown the play dead. “Leave it all on the field.”

When the weather’s hot, that athletic bromide takes on sinister tones.

“Last Whistle” is about a veteran Texas high school football coach pushing his boys to the limit in his effort to achieve that undefeated season.

“I can feel it,” Coach Vic (Brad Leland) growls. And an instant later, his real motivation rears its head.

“Think I’ll get that offer?” he asks his assistant (Eric Nelson).

Coach Vic is awfully long in the tooth to be thinking about making that big NCAA leap. But there’s a whole lot “FOOTball” “The Last Whistle” throws at us that beggars belief.

Start with the movie’s half-speed version of on-field play, stripping the game of its velocity and violence, guys in the cleanest (and dullest designed) uniforms ever seen in the fourth quarter on natural grass.

That’s why most of “Last Whistle” is about Coach Vic’s struggles off the field. He’s got a rich kid (Tyler Perez) who thinks his big-donor daddy will arm-twist him some more playing time.

Star running back Benny (Fred Tolliver Jr.) is thinking about college, a kid whose mother (Deanne Lauvin) isn’t crazy about him wasting time on sports when he should be focusing on academics and the future they can give him.

The community lionizes him, but that’s because he’s winning. He lives alone, having run his wife off and estranged himself from his daughter. Hitting the local bar is his only means of unwinding, as he is feeling the heat from his might-be-my-replacement assistant.

When the rich kid peer-pressures Benny and a few others to dog it, showing up for practice, Coach thunders for “eleven GASSERS,” one brutal round of windsprints for every minute this quartet of slackers made everyone else wait. The assistant thinks that’s a bit much.

“Ah don’t CARE what you think!”

That puts a kid in an ambulance.

“Is he gonna be OK?” one player wonders as that ambulance departs.

“I don’t think so. Didn’t even turn the lights on.”

Football deaths are way down from their peak, we learn (as does Coach Vic) as the school board and the town rile themselves up to run the old coach off. The local press is all over him, as as his fellow barflies. His reaction is off-the-charts tone-deaf.

I mean, he’s got the season and his possible college job to think about!

The trial that comes when the mother of the dead player sues is laughably intimate, convenient and low-stakes.

And the story resolves itself in a way guaranteed to deliver eye-rolls.

Brad Leland plays the mayor of Nome in the new “Great Alaskan Race” feature film, a career character actor who does his best in this rare leading man role. He makes us feel neither pity nor revulsion for this callous man who has made his sport and his job his life.

Lauvin has the best scenes and best lines, a smart mother who sizes up the coach’s influence and promises to Benny with “So, you trust him? Everyone I ever worked with is a liar UNTIL they put it on paper!”

The world doesn’t need another movie or TV series about the Texas football obsession (Leland was in “Friday Night Lights,” too). It surely doesn’t need another African American athlete claiming “I ain’t smart like my mama” in search of a way out via athletics.

Pat the indie film production team on the back for trying, but even the varios faith-based films centered on high school football look more polished and realistic than this.

Whatever the ol’ball coaches say, it’s what Texans like to say that matters in movies of his genre.

“Go big, or go home.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and language

Cast: Brad Leland, Deanne Lauvin, Fred Tolliver Jr., Tyler Perez

Credits: Written and directed by Rob Smat. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:28

The writer director announced his comeback with “First Reformed” in 2017.

Now, the man who directed “Cat People” and “Light Sleeper” and “Afliction” and scripted “Taxi Driver” has Oscar Isaac to star in this gambling/vengeance drama.

Paul Schrader has a Willem Dafoe picture “Nine Men from Now” in the works as well.

From Variety

https://t.co/oiZ7Pv3QBB https://t.co/g1Hne3nfXW https://twitter.com/Variety_Film/status/1189180855261917191?s=17

Nothing much happens in “Light from Light,” an East Tennessee character study bathed in mourning cloaked in quiet.

The lead characters meet because she’s an amateur ghost hunter, with lifelong intuitions, and he’s a grieving widower who wonders if his late wife is haunting the house she grew up in. But it’s not really about that. It still makes an interesting jumping-off point for a search for closure and new beginnings, none of which play out in conventional ways.

We hear Sheila’s story in a community radio interview. It started in childhood when “these dreams I had turned out to be prophetic” she says. Sheila, played by Marin Ireland (“Homeland,” “Hell or High Water”), is soft-spoken and unassuming. That makes her seem more credible.

What did she do with this “gift?”

“I had questions. Just questions.”

These days, she supports herself and her teen son (Josh Wiggins) running a rent-a-car counter at the Knoxville airport. But a priest (David Cale) heard the interview, and he approaches her. There’s a local man she might be able to help.

Jim Gaffigan plays Richard, a fish hatchery worker who would seem depressed even if he hadn’t added “haunted” to his demeanor. He’s wondering if these senses that someone’s been taking hold of his arm are the spirit of his late wife Susanne.

The question everybody around Sheila asks, and has to answer him or herself, is “Do you believe in ghosts?” Sheila’s lack of commitment to her own answer, and avoidance of the hard-sell are her best selling points. Sure, she’ll help — check out the remote old house where Susanne grew up when it’s good and dark.

What’ll this cost?

“I don’t charge. It just makes this more complicated.”

She just needs some sort of informal insurance waiver, because who knows what might happen? And she’ll need to rustle up some gear, and some help.

Sheila may be looking to give Richard some closure, but she’s plainly looking for a little herself. She’s no longer with “her group” of ghostbusters. She has to sit in on a paid seminar to get access the temperature probes and CCTV cameras for a night of ghost hunting.

Owen (Wiggins) and Lucy (Atheena Frizzell) are helping Sheila in her ghost hunt, and might be an item, prom dates even. But she’s about to head off to college, and he’s so ethical he asks “What’s the point?”

He’s following mom’s softly sold advice — “Don’t fall in love with sombody just because they treat you nice.”

Lucy and Owen’s mutual teenage concern is attraction, but he’s facing a circumscribed future, one he hasn’t worked out yet.

East Tennessee filmmaker Paul Harrill (“Something, Anything”) builds his film on soft-spoken conversations, quietly-voiced disagreements and — almost as an afterthought, suspense.

Are they actually going to encounter the supernatural?

Sheila’s methodical routine hangs on exploring the silence of the house by flashlight, and that’s as effective a scene-setter for ghostly encounters as anything the horror movie universe serves up, pretty much on a weekly basis.

“Is anyone here? If you’d like to communicate, let yourself be known.”

So polite.

Ireland’s understated performance, semi-skeptical, faintly credulous and luminescent with empathy, anchors “Light from Light.” It’s acting that teaches us not to expect too much, especially anything conventional.

It doesn’t take much for something to feel “extraordinary” under these conditions.

Gaffigan is mainly a reactor here, a hurting but thoughtful man who picks up a book after stocking a stream with trout.

No one so much as attempts an East Tennessee drawl, which I know well. Perhaps that “Winter’s Bone” touch would have made the ghost believing and ghost sensing subtexts quaint, Southern superstitions. But snippets of scenery aside, nothing grounds a movie in a place like accents.

“Light from Light” still feels like film firmly footed in reality, so much so that the few truly suspenseful moments seem almost epic in scope when they couldn’t be more intimate. It’s an exercise in tone and performance that rewards the viewer in ways you can’t quite articulate, but sense nevertheless.

Cast: Marin Ireland, Jim Gaffigan, Josh Wiggins, Atheena Frizzell.

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Harrill. A Grasshopper Film release.

Running time: 1:24

Remember that scene in “World War Z” where the zombies take on ant collectivist behavior and overwhelm the walls of Erezt Israel?

There’s such a moment in “Assimilate,” a C-grade thriller about “pod people” who are zombies in all but name. As the movie itself isn’t worth your trouble, let me save you the trouble and say that what I’m talking about is the unique way of upending the payoff in that remote farmhouse surrounded by zombies scenerio from “Night of the Living Dead,” and that it happens at the 55 minute mark.

It’s a lulu, and anybody planning their own zombie project should check it out and steal it. Because few are going to even bother Netflixing “Assimilate,” which again, isn’t a zombie movie.

We see the ants before the opening credits have ended. They’re swarming, sugar ant-sized critters getting on fruit and vegetables in the gardens of tiny Multon, Missouri.

That’s where two high school buds, Zach and Randy (Joel Courtney and Callum Worthy) live, a place they are desperate to escape. They document why on their new spy-cam Youtube series, “Welcome to Oblivion.”

It’s a place “too boring for crime,” but with these hidden lapel cameras, which the dorks turn up their lapels for (giving away the game) to score their “scoops,” they plan “to show the people of Multon the way they really are.”

They’ve barely started stirring up trouble when weird shrieks in the night and neighbors with strange bites start turning up. The bites magically heal, but those bitten take on the catatonic, humorless stare of pod people.

As the two gather video, they try to interest the deputy sheriff (Cam Gigandet) and the cute girl Zach (Or is it Randy?) fancies, Kayla (Andi Matichak).

One buys in, the other doesn’t. And as the shrieks spread, the conspiracy of local silence grows. Don’t fight it, “Assimilate” is the message of that silence.

Horror movies succeed or fail in a lot of ways, but the real Achilles heel of too many of them is in front of the camera. The actors don’t commit, don’t get across terror, panic, paranoia or rage.

That’s an issue here. As their family and friends are “replaced,” as new versions are spawned in the usual sci–fi/horror ways, frights are hard to come by, either on the screen or in the viewing of what’s on the screen. No character freaks out.

That would be the proper human reaction to witnessing something this horrific and extraordinary.

A little “Blair Witch” hand-held camera here, a manic chase by a nude replacement version of this or that member of the cast — probably the only “commitment” we sense in the performances — is all that livens up this seriously humdrum flick.

The dialogue is out of the “Lines you always hear in horror movies” book.

“What the hell WAS that?” “Either the entire town’s gone crazy, or WE have!” “You’re not my mom!”

None of it adds up to much. But if stream-it-you-must, feel free to jump ahead to that 55 minute mark. That’s a clever enough conceit to turn up in a better movie than “Assimilate.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, some nudity

Cast: Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy, Andi Matichak and Cam Gigandet

Credits: Directed by John Murlowski, script by John Murlowski and Steven Palmer Peterson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:33

Lin Manuel Miranda is producing, making this Rita Moreno doc happen. Long overdue.

https://t.co/QP36ag4zac https://t.co/3Cx8exOSJj https://twitter.com/REMEZCLA/status/1188616380519735296?s=17

Mixed reviews came in for the lovely re-edit of this movie, which was marred by Harvey Weinstein in a recut, and then abandoned as his #MeToo troubles exploded.

But here’s an Interesting history of the rescue edit that saved “The Current War” via The Hollywood Reporter.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-martin-scorsese-saved-current-war-weinstein-collapse-1250355

It’s not exactly fair, releasing a thriller with the title “Bloody Marie” right around Halloween. But hey, anything to trick the horror crowd into reading subtitles, right?

“Bloody Marie” is a Dutch character study, a fraught if not entirely taut melodramatic thriller about an alcoholic in a death spiral, drinking away her days and nights in Amerstadam’s red light district.

Marie (German actress Susanne Wolff) is a graphic artist who gained fame from the graphic novel “Porn for the Blind.”

Now, she dances by herself in bars, fends off the rare fan that recognizes her, mouths off at bars and drinks and drinks and drinks among the whores, pimps and druggies of Europe’s most notorious (Almost) Anything Goes District.

How bad is her drinking? The Asian immigrant who runs her local liquor store quietly suggests, “You should stop drinking,” and cuts her off. That staggers Marie. Actually, she was already staggering. But she’s enraged enough to stick her finger down her throat so she can “vomit all over your store” (in Dutch, with English subtitles).

Marie sits at her drawing board, in her ancient but comfy flat in that same red light district, and stares at the blank page. Or she ruminates and draws an idea that might capture something that happened that day, but which is going nowhere, in a narrative sense.

She has writer’s block.

But that’s not necessarily why she drinks. She lost her mother, recently. And even though she is overwhelmed with guilt about that, the guilt is over how drunk she was when her mother died. She was already lost in a bottle. It’s only gotten worse. Much worse.

Hearing “Your mother has forgiven you” from a fan is cold comfort, and no comfort at all.

Maybe, we think, she’ll realize she’s hit bottom with the whole liquor store debacle. Begging her publisher for an advance because she’s broke should do the trick. Or maybe that epiphany will come when, drunk and desperate for another drink, she trades her fancy red shoes for a bottle she sees a pimp carrying. It’s a rainy night and she’s blocks from home.

Addicts don’t plan ahead.

But she does not take stock. She takes a ladder from the courtyard and drunkenly climbs to the roof on the dark, dank night, shouting at the city, and later prising open the window of her next door neighbor to get her hands on some money. And that’s when her boozy exploits start to have consequences.

Wolff takes Marie from bleary-eyed bigmouth, ranting about toxic “masculinity” to toxic males in bars, to despair to desperately fighting to survive.

The guy she stole the money from? He was the pimp, Dagomir (Dragos Bucor) who traded for her shoes. She figures out, a little late, the downside to being hip enough to live in the red light district. Legalized or not — unsavory and deadly sex trade practices happen, and are kept out of sight.

The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director  Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.

We, on the other hand, have been expecting it — fearing it and fearing for her. Whatever randomness the script serves up, fleshing out Marie’s back story but never explaining her, leaving big gaps in her motivation and in the motivation of those who menace her, the picture keeps us on edge. She’s that much of a trainwreck.

What we don’t expect is a coda, after all that mayhem, that touches the heart and takes your breath away.

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Susanne Wolff, Dragos Bucur, Alexia Lestiboudois

Credits: Written and directed by Lennert Hillege and Guido van Driel. An Uncork’d Release.

Running time: 1:27

The Korean director who first gained global fame with his wry creature feature “The Host” reconsiders that host-parasite relationship with his latest, “Parasite.”

Bong Joon Ho has a created a dark satire of haves and enterprising have-nots, a film that begins as a delightful “Big Con” comedy and probes deeper and turns more politically pointed — and more violent — the further it goes along.

Most cleverly, this skewering of global inequality and class warfare, at least as it pertains to his home peninsula, leaves unanswered the big question of an era when wealth has been callously and mercilessly redistributed upward to a rapacious few.

That question is, “Who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes?”

Bong’s muse, the hulking comic Song Kang-ho, plays the unemployed and broke patriarch of a family of four on the bottom rung of Seoul society — literally. They live in a smelly basement apartment where they’ve lost cell service, and on the evening we meet them, their free source of wi-fi — a neighbor — has just password-protected his router.

With his wife, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) and two enterprising college age kids, Ki-jung  (Park So-dam) ) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), father Ki-taek folds pizza delivery boxes, the lone hustle they have that pays in this economy. And Youtube tutorials or not, they can’t even do that right.

How will they cling to this dump, where the toilet sits up on an interior ledge next to the window drunken bums pee on every night? Everybody wonders what Ki-taek’s “plan” is. Dad is big on “What’s your plan?”

A windfall that he hasn’t planned for is their lifeline, it turns out. Ki-woo’s buddy, headed off to study abroad, recommends him as replacement for the rich teen girl he’s been tutoring. Sister Ki-jung forges Ki-woo some ace credentials as “Kevin,” which win over the girl (Jung Ji-so) and her frazzled, pampered mother (Jo Yeo-jeong).

Her father (Lee Sun-kyun)? He may get a clue. Will it be in time?

And all a “Parasite” needs, we see, if that first foot in the door.  “Kevin” is quick to recommend “a friend of a cousin” who studied in Illinois as an art tutor to the ADHD artist child in the house. “Jessica” is the name Ki-jung goes by.  Sizing the kid and his mother’s worries up, she improvises “art therapist” into her resume as well.

This scrawled, dark corner in all of little Da-song’s drawings? That’s “the schizophrenia zone,” she says, freaking Mom out. That ability to lie on the fly is a family gift, and it’s what puts all four of the Kims in the employ of the Parks, by hook or by crook.

This 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or winner has fake tutors straight out of Shakespeare (“The Taming of the Shrew”). But I’d be surprised if Bong Joon ho didn’t see 2018’s Japanese Cannes Film Festival entry “Shoplifters,” and wasn’t inspired to whip up a funnier and more ambitious take on an underworld of low-rent grifters struggling to survive in the Golden Age of Income Inequality.

But here, there’s sympathy and even a modicum respect for their “marks.” In an economy where jobs are scarce and survival precarious, the Kims are grateful to have the jobs they finagle (and lie and cheat) their way into.

Ki-jung seems to be the most ruthless and cunning one, taking after her pitiless mother. Ki-jung is the one who surmises that the family driver can be unseated, and lets her folks know (in Korean, with English subtitles) “I set my trap in the Benz,” the family limo, a trap that will get that driver canned.

All these amusing machinations are just the table-setting for the confrontations to come. It turns out, the Kims aren’t the only ones desperate enough to prey on people like the Parks. And as they hustle them and deal with petty humiliations and bourgeois snobbery, they start to wonder, and make us wonder, just who is the host and who is the real parasite here?

Song Kang-ho has an oafish soulfulness that his director has tapped into, in film after film. He can let us feel pity for a character and laugh at him (a little) at the same time.

The laughs don’t dry up as things take a bloodier turn, but rather devolve into class warfare giggles. We know we should be shrinking from the mayhem, not chuckling. And yet, as in a horror movie where we figure “They have it coming,” we can’t help ourselves.

There’s something of a Great Leap Forward in Bong Joon Ho’s ambitions and skill at realizing them here, something that his failed Netflix satire “Ojkja” and the over-reaching sci-fi  “Snowpiercer” couldn’t manage.

With “Parasite” he transcends genre even as he sharpens his social satire skills, delivering a movie that will resonate from Seoul to Syracuse, Helsinki to Hong Kong, one of the great films of 2019.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and sexual content

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Park So-dam, Jo Yeo-Jeong, Lee Sun-kyun, Choi Woo-sik, Jang Hye-jin, Lee Jeong-eun,  Jung Ji-so

Credits: Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, co-written by Han Jin Won. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:12

Justin Lee, the new King of the B Movies, is back on the screen for his sixth movie in the past two years, a Western wearing the weary title, “Badland.”

The writer-director of “The Reckoning,” “Big Legend” and “Any Bullet Will Do” has lined up his most impressive cast yet — Oscar winner Mira Sorvino, 2020 Oscar honoree Wes Studi,  screen legend Bruce Dern, and veteran players such as Tony “Candyman” Todd, Amanda Wyss, James Russo and Jeff Fahey.

And yet the prolific Lee still has room for the hulking country music baritone Trace Adkins in a key role. And for his leading man, Lee is still leaning on his muse, a competent but colorless actor, Kevin Makely, whose chief virtues are that he looks a bit like Bradley Cooper, and he’s always available.

The result is the usual limp, long-winded lope through genre conventions, saddled to a leading man lacking the spark to make it compelling.

“Badland” follows the portentously-named Mathias Breecher (Makely), a Pinkerton detective turned into bounty hunter, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner by a Reconstruction Era senator (Tony Todd) for purposes of rounding up ex-Confederate war criminals.

In a series of episodes given chapter headings — “Chapter One: The General,” etc. — Makely’s loner with a two six-shooters, a six day beard, a duster and a saddlebag full of warrants, hunts down men who carried out massacres in the Civil War.

Adkins, all presence and rumble (as opposed to acting skill) and sporting an eyepatch, is The General, intoning in a Foghorn Leghorn drawl, “May ah inquire as to whether or not you are a VETERAN, suh?”

He confesses that he has “cut the thoats of many a private,” before Breecher mentions his need for “an oak tree big enough to hold a man of your stature.”

The murderous good ol’boy barely has time to finish his drink and mutter “Damn those Yankees, damn them AND their ideals,” when Breecher has gunned down the general and his entire gang.

And so the movie goes, Breecher hunting down “The Sheriff” (Fahey) or whoever, facing down armed gangs protecting his suspect, leaving bodies crumpled in the dust wherever he goes.

I think my favorite chapter might be “The Cooke’s.” Yes, the chapter title has a typo in it. When you’re cranking them out as  fast as Lee, niceties like grammar and editing get shortchanged.

It’s not the cutting of the film that is the issue here, although everything shuffles along at an invalid’s pace, and at least some of that is due to pedestrian post production. No, the biggest flaws in Lee’s projects are the lack of fresh passes at the script, workshopping, story-editing. Judicious trimming would cut down on the eye-rolling dialogue, for starters.

Here’s an example. Breecher has shown up to confront “Captain Cooke,” played by Bruce Dern in yet another bed-bound performance. He’s a sickly old man, and rather than make the murderous bastard face justice, Breecher decides to just wait for him to die. Maybe he’s sweet on Cooke’s daughter (Sorvino).

“It is my job to watch men like you take their last breath,” Breecher intones. Good line. And then Lee has Makely ruin it with an anti-climax.

“This is the burden I must carry in this life.”

Groan.

Fahey is, as could be expected, the most impressive villain in the lot. Even his character is woefully underdeveloped, his crimes only cursorily mentioned. But he is silky smooth in his Sleepy Time Down South drawl.

“Sleep evaaaaades me,” he purrs, “for mah mind runs RAMpant with thoughts of the past!”

There are anachronism in the speech, and the private police force Pinkertons, post Civil War, were involved in tracking desperados who robbed trains (The James/Younger Gang) on behalf of the railroad companies, and trying to smother the newly-born labor movement in the crib on behalf of the Robber Barons. They never did anything so righteous as chase down war criminals.

But the shoot-outs are at least 1950s TV level sharp. The production values are solid. There’s more grit and grime than in earlier Justin Lee Westerns, even if he goes overboard with the buzzing flies sound effect.

We know it stank back then, hoss. We can SEE the smell.

And “Badland” was filmed on the same “studio ranch” that has been home to TV’s “Westworld.”

But until Lee finds himself a story editor and a more literate, genre-savvy group of readers to workshop his screenplays, until he figures out that hitching his wagon to a star who is more “available” than charismatic, these films are never going to hide their malnourished, rushed origins.

Quick and dirty, in other words.

Cast: Kevin Makely, Mira Sorvino, Jeff Fahey, Tony Todd, Wes Studi, Trace Adkins, James Russo and Bruce Dern.

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Lee. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:42