Perhaps this song, used in a much-discussed film of the fall…
Inspired the editors of this trailer to include a different Cream song, and perhaps it, too, will end up in this January mov…
That means we should be keeping our movie-going ears perked for “Badge,” “Strange Brew” or perhaps this one. Because three uses in movies in a short period of time just means directors and music editors are listening to each other’s work.
Comic book heroes may possess an immutable timelessness, their virtues more or less the same through the decades.
But every generation has its own Joker — camp or callous, twisted or fey.
This is the “Joker” America deserves, here and now. He is a villain of the dispossessed, a bad guy — like X-Men’s Holocaust survivor Magneto — with a legitimate beef with the world.
Joaquin Phoenix and co-writer/director Todd “The Hangover” Phillips give us a equal parts raging id and on-the-spectrum ego, a broken, beaten-down man in an angry age and a mental health patient abandoned by a system bankrupted by tax-cuts-for-the-rich politicos, the sort of ticking bomb NRA apologists like to say “slipped through the cracks.”
Repellently violent, intimately epic and powered by a performance so absorbed, hurt, confused and just “out there” that it makes everything that’s come before it in the genre just a vamp in tights, “Joker” turns every previous film in this justly maligned genre into “just a cartoon.”
Damn. There’s an Oscar in this.
Phoenix, gaunt to the point where his features are a grotesque skull on a skeletal body, is Arthur Fleck, a Gotham clown-for-hire, spinning “Everything Must Go” signs, until street punks steal the sign and pummel him for wanting it back, putting on a song and dance for a children’s hospital until the moment his innate weirdness — he laughs, uncontrollably, at stress and tragedy, and has a laminated card that explains this to strangers on the street and on the subway — gets him fired from that.
His invalid mother (Frances Conroy) always lectured him that “I was put here to spread joy and laughter.” But his stand-up act is the anchoring delusion of a life built on them.
What kind of comic can’t finish a joke or a thought without breaking into chillingly maniacal giggles? Aside from Jimmy Fallon?
He can fantasize about the gorgeous young mother (Zazie Beetz) who lives down the hall, about getting his big break from celebrated talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro, taking “King of Comedy” in full circle).
But Arthur is just a guy on seven medications, incapable of responding to any threat with anything more than gasping laughter in a 1980ish metropolis covered in grime, greed and graffiti.
Until that fateful day, that is — his Bernard Goetz moment. That the victims are Wall Street (or whatever its Gotham equivalent is) thugs is a tipping point moment in a city and society looted by the imperious rich, bursting at the seams with the struggling working poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill abandoned by “the system.”
Arthur’s act is “V for Vendetta” scary — to the one percent. The ruling class of millionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) and his oligarchic ilk are rather like the folks fearing the “violence” this film could inspire. This is “The Dark Knight” origin as seen from the point of view of someone not a privileged vigilante.
If there’s violence inspired by “Joker,” it won’t be on theaters. It’ll be in brokerages, privacy-stealing tech firms and corners of corrupt crony capitalism.
Maybe put extra guards on anything named “Trump.”
“The worst part about having mental illness,” Arthur decides, “is people expecting you to behave as if you don’t.”
When the man the world has ignored lashes out, off his meds, armed and in his best clown makeup, the world has to notice.
Top flight character actors Bill Camp and Shea Whigham are cops hunting for the clown who killed three guys who had it coming on the subway.
Marc Maron plays the late night show producer who sees more menace in this failed-comic/object of fun than his host (DeNiro). Glenn Fleshler is a fellow clown of dubious “friendly” motives.
But this is Joaquin’s show, our most dangerous actor going to the most dangerous places in a DC Comics film that so transfuses the genre as to make the entire Marvel canon seem like piffle, or at the very least, fluff.
And if everybody who knows any bit of “Batman” lore knows where this is going, if the violence crosses the “repellent” line into gratuitous, if the Chaplin references (“Modern Times,” and his song “Smile”) and Sinatra notes do little to dress up an ugly age referencing an earlier ugly age, that’s all of a piece.
“Joker” is the anti-hero the movies want, crave and must have right now, the Joker this generation deserves.
MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert DeNiro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Bill Camp and Shea Whigham
Credits: Directed by Todd Phillips, script by Todd Phillips, Scott Silver. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:01
For a movie that won big at the Venice Film Festival, and allegedly has Oscar buzz, a film expected to snatch the October movie opening record at the box office, “Joker” has awfully mixed early reviews.
It looks bleak as all get out, the ultimate “dark/darker/darkest” take on a comic book character that the graphic novel fangirls and fanboys adore. But the violence has people — especially surviving family members of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting — concerned that like the darker “Dark Night” pictures, the impressionable with easy access to firearms could start acting out.
I’m not the last critic to get around to it, and they’re showing it to critics in Florida a whole, gosh, DAY before the damned thing opens.
Let’s see what the fuss is about, shall we?
A good time travel movie doesn’t have to cost a lot. The Spanish “Time Crimes” the American indie jewel “Primer” prove that.
All it needs in order to succeed are engaging characters, a ticking-clock plot and a thought exercise that we can wrestle with as the picture unfolds, and in the days after seeing it. Good films of the genre, from “Back to the Future” on down the line, invite us to work out the chronology, the “logic” — not so much of the time-travel device, the way it happens, but in how characters cope with the the timeline, and avoid (or succeed) running into versions of themselves.
“Time Trap” (“Timetrap” it appears in the film’s actual credits) makes a go at the first prerequisite, ignores the second and manages to make a complete hash out of the third.
No “mulling it over” when it’s done. It’s too damned dumb for that.
The Mark Dennis/Ben Foster film (“Strings”) weaves in a little “Fountain of Youth” here, some of H.G. Welles’ “The Time Machine” there, stuffing its protagonists in a cave where things go wrong, people get hurt and die and it takes them a very long time to figure out that outside of the cave, time is skipping by in a blur.
A Texas academic archaelogist (Andrew Wilson) has been hunting for people who disappeared in the high desert decades and decades ago. We meet him as he’s gotten his best clue, and hustles back to his house for gear to duck into a cave he needs to check out.
He orders his grad assistants (Brianne Howey, Reiley McClendon) to stay behind. He and his dog will look into this cave. They have a notion it’s the mythic Fountain of Youth he’s looking for. Hitching their academic wagons to a flake? Maybe.
Naturally, Jackie (McClendon) and Taylor (Howey) resolve to go after him. And just for efficiency’s sake, they hit up another student, Cara (Cassidy Gifford, yeah she has famous parents) with access to her dad’s SUV.
She brings along camcorder-crazed little sister Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich) who in turn,insists they drag along an even younger friend of hers, a kid named Wallace but who prefers “Furby” (Max Wright).
They track down the professor’s van, can’t raise him on the radio, and decide to follow him underground. Things start to go wrong the moment they do.
The clues the movie gives us about this cave and what’s in there are a creepy noises, suggestions that others came through here long along, a glimpsed cowboy here, primitive not-quite-Morlocks (from Welles’ “The Time Machine”) there.
The story’s great leap forward in exposition is one of the lamest I’ve ever seen — “Timetrap” is reliant on “found footage” of how this character read that “journal” someone left behind, or footage of how a character came to a grisly end.
A faint attempt is made at telling the story with parallel structure, letting us see Dr. Hooper’s poking around cutting back to the students’ search for him. That proved too complicated and was abandoned.
Whole threads of the story go out the window, too.
And while the third act has a couple of modestly exciting cliffhangers (hanging from a cliff, or a ladder) and some very good effects, the whole affair is more of a head-scratcher than anything you’d recommend.
The moments of pathos are kept short and never referred back to, in spite of the presence of a body from one of their number still within reach. Short mourning period when you’re trapped far below, I guess.
The cast is young and attractive, but the characters are poorly developed. Some semblance of giving every searcher a special skill — the best rock climber, the one person who knows how to drive a stickshift Land Rover, the photographer — is instantly dropped.
And the dialogue is duller than most any conversation you’d overhear at Starbucks.
“Wait, it could be a BOOBY trap!”
“Relax, this isn’t ‘The Goonies.'”
“What’s a ‘Goonie?'”
Nobody wants to speculate, nobody “explains,” nothing important, anyway. Not unless it’s on video.
It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre.
It’s not worth your time.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Olivia Draguicevich, Andrew Wilson, Cassidy Gifford, Brianne Howey, Reiley McClendon and Max Wright
Credits: Directed by Mark Dennis, Ben Foster, script by Mark Dennis. A Paladin/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
Sometime between “Leprechaun” and “Leprechaun 2” it became fashionable, or a smart career move, even, to concoct a horror film that people would label “so bad it’s good.”
It never made much sense, and there’s always been junk cinema that some fans embraced beyond the world of “cult film” and “guilty pleasure.”
“Plan Nine from Outer Space” has become legend.
“The Room” was celebrated to the point it led to “The Disaster Artist,” although any horror fan knows that “Leprechaun 2” is much more worthy of “The worst film ever made” than either that, or Ed Wood’s loony “Plan Nine.”
“Devil’s Junction” went through many contortions between concept and screen, title changes from “Handy Dandy” to “Devil’s Junction: Handy Dandy’s Revenge,” a director who wanted to change his name on the credits to the colors in the light spectrum acronym — “Roy G. Biv.”
Seeing “Devil’s Junction” — I think that’s the title they’re hanging onto — one gets it. Alan Smithee’s too good to take the credit.
It’s about a group of friends trapped in an abandoned Detroit TV station — WOMB (Woot!) — by the ventriloquist dummies left behind from a show that was performed, in studio, in an earlier era.
It was plainly, one of the would-be victims notes, “some f—-d up ‘Howdy Doody’ ripoff.”
The “200 year old” ventriloquist is also out to get them. And some nameless hulk in a welding helmet (shades of “Plan Nine”). And an obese “surgeon” in clown makeup.
None of it makes any sense, but when you’re a screenwriter trying to brush off the unexplainable, “Masons” and “Masonic relics” will do.
Steffan (Jake Red) has dreams that his developer dad will let him turn this property into an exclusive club, and he lures five of his 20something friends — a fiesty lesbian (KateLynn E. Newberry), the jock with NFL dreams (Kyle Anderson), the automation lab scientist Doc (Danni Spring), the wealthy-enough womanizer (Arthur Marroquin) and his latest blonde conquest (Cody Renee Cameron) into WOMB after hours.
Jostling the stored dummies, making fun of them, triggers the wooden puppets to life. let the torture porn begin!
I laughed at the first time a dummy sticks its head around a corner, snooping on these young folks joking, smoking a joint, on Rick (Marroquin) and Abby (Cameron) getting naked and getting busy. There are two laughs in this thing, by my count.
An alcoholic businessman (horror veteran Bill Moseley, a mascot in horror films since “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”) isn’t so drunk that he doesn’t remember what used to happen to kids in the neighborhood while “Mr. Jolly & The Handy Dandy Show” was on air.
He’s set to confront the spectral Mr. Jolly (Bill Oberst, Jr of TV’s “Age of the Living Dead”), only to wind up in the villain’s clutches for a session of tied-up trash talking.
“Who’s gonna win? The man, or the monster?”
“Smart money’s always on THE MONSTER!”
The businessman’s threats — “This ends tonight! You will not succeed. You will not survive!” — don’t hold a lot of water.
“I’m a 200 year old magician with a band of killer puppets.” “You don’t scare me,” in other words.
The puppets stalk and talk and crack wise when “the smart one” takes a shot at stopping them — with mace.
There’s no logic to the “story,” no reason for the hulk in the welding helmet, no performance that matches the freak-the-f-out events befalling them all (well, the women get it), no real budget for effects — save for the ones that involve dismemberment and blood.
“Roy G. Biv” & Co. succeeded in making a bad horror picture. They just didn’t make one bad enough to be so bad that it’s good.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, torture, nudity, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Bill Moseley, Bill Oberst, Jr., KateLynn E. Newberry, Jake Red, Kyle Anderson, Danni Spring, Cody Renee Cameron and Arthur Marroquin
Credits: Jeff Broadstreet, aka Roy G. Biv, script by J.S. Brinkley (story by Donald Borza II). An Acort International release.
Running time: 1:22
A January release from newish distributor STX, a film that takes Ritchie back to what he does best. “Rocknrolla,” “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch.”
The horrors of “Aladdin” are forgiven?
Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Hugh Grant, Colin Farell, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding and blimey, Jeremy Strong.
Check out that damned Hugh Grant in a bad guy beard in the opening!
Henry Golding? Watch to butch up after “Crazy Rich Asians,” mate.
Looks like fun. Jan. 24.
I had hoped that the cringe-worthy comedy that took its place as a TV genre would confine itself to the short doses-long format of the sitcom.
But no. There’s a bit of cringing involved in most every film that alumni of “The Office” or “Veep” bring with them to big screen projects.
On rare occasions — a Steve Carell movie here and there, Paul Lieberstein (“The Office”) in “Song of Back and Neck,” for instance, “Cedar Rapids,” the only worthy star vehicle on Ed Helms’ resume — the squirm-inducing persona that hangs around a performer’s neck makes for something amusing and rewarding spread over 90 minutes.
Every other time? Ugh.
Case in point? “Under the Eiffel Tower,” a star vehicle for Matt Walsh of “Veep” that has many a cringe and barely a laugh. It starts with a huuuuuge cringe, and no comic payoff, and spirals down the drain like wine in the spit-sink of a tasting gone terribly wrong.
Utterly without charm? Close enough.
Walsh plays Stuart, a Louisville bourbon salesman who drinks his way out of a job and is inexplicably rescued by a “join the family on our trip to France” lifeline tossed by friends.
Even less explicably, he betrays the friendship of Tillie (Michaela Watkins) and Frank (David Wain) by turning a lifelong “Uncle” Stuart connection to their new PhD daughter (Dylan Gelula of “The Unsinkable Kimmy Schmidt”) into something icky beyond measure.
He proposes to this woman he’s known since childhood, someone half his age, “Under the Eiffel Tower” and in front of her dismayed dad and comically furious mother.
Watkinsm, of “Good Boys” and TV’s “Transparent,” is the best thing in “Under the Eiffel Tower,” and after that abortive, friendship-killing debacle, she is rarely seen again as the movie leaves that tower and proceeds, in the most trite and contrived ways, to pair up Stuart with a roguesh Scottish footballer stereotype (Reid Scott) as traveling companion, and lovely and sophisticated vintner Louise (Judith Godrèche), whom they meet on a train and proceed to compete over for the rest of the film.
Romance is in the air, or in the wine, in “the land that gave us Piaf, the guillotine and Andre the Giant.”
The “meet cute” debate over the relative merits of wine and bourbon is almost clever (Godrèche had a hand in the script), if an inaccurate oversimplification.
“Wine makes you feel warm and sensual. Whisky dills and agitates.”
Stuart is a tactless schlub, Liam is an arrogant, hustling douche, and we run into a Frenchman or two who fits that feminine hygeine description as well.
Everything happens inorganically, with little regard for amusing twists, fated “connection” and the like. No, this French beauty must be drawn to the boorish alcoholic Lousivlle doormat because…he can cook and she can’t? He’s a born salesman and she isn’t, improvising a plummy wine-tasting spiel for moronic American and British tourists?
One day, after she’s let them stay at the winery owned by the infirm American Gerard (Gary Cole), she asks, “You’re still here?”
That’s the perfect question to ask the movie, and the best spot to dump out of it lest you waste another 45 minutes on this directionless “road comedy,” this unamusing and unromantic “romantic comedy.”
Love the scenery (not enough of it), hated most everything else about “Under the Eiffel Tower.”
MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult situations, alcohol is used and abused
Cast: Matt Walsh, Judith Godrèche, Michaela Watkins, Reid Scott, Dylan Gelula, david Wain and Gary Cole
Credits: Directed by Archie Borders, script by Archie Borders, David Henry and Judith Godrèche
An Orchard/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:27
“The Joker and I? Broke up.”
And so Warners launches the breakout character from “Suicide Squad,” the one bit of casting that paid off, into a spinoff Margot Robbie star vehicle.
Dazzling trailer, in an eye candy sense. Very “Sin City” — lush, saturated colors, etc.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and her sometime co-star and paramour Ewan McGregor are also in the cast of “Birds of Prey.”
In America and much of the rest of the world, the Battle of Inchon is celebrated as the masterstroke of General Douglas MacArthur’s career, a surprise United Nations amphibious assault behind enemy lines on a beachhead with some of the highest tides in Asia.
But in Korea, they remember a pivotal diversionary attack that made Inchon (or Incheon) possible. That’s why “Battle of Jangsari” is already a blockbuster south of the 38th parallel on that peninsula.
It’s a solid combat film, a visceral, sentimental account of that assault by the Republic of Korea Army, another battle against impossible odds and one fought by teenaged volunteers, most with only 10 days of training, soldiers too green to even have been issued service serial numbers.
Releasing it in North America (in Korean, with English subtitles) reminds us that whatever the differences in training and tactics from nation to nation, modern war films have the same tropes, values and action beats the world over.
In combat film buff shorthand, it’s a a “Saving Private Ryan” styled story of ptriotism, heroism, sacrifice and viscious hand-to-hand combat on the beach at Jangsari and in the trenches that overlook it. The youth of the “assault team” is treated with “Field of Lost Shoes” reverence. And there’s plenty of “Gallipoli/Hamburger Hill” cynicism, too, the callous high command, the ally (the United States) that might not be the omnipotent, righteous savior that we here in the U.S. like to attach to our intervention there.
The “men” of Captain Lee (Kim Myung-Min) are not even old enough to wear that label with confidence, most fresh-faced kids not even of shaving age yet. The 772 student volunteers are seasick as they ride out a typhoon on their way to the beachhead.
The ship’s captain can’t believe the “suicide mission” these kids have been ordered to undertake, distracting the North Koreans, who’d invaded South Korea three months before, while MacArthur’s armada slipped north to cut most of the enemy off, a trap that would all but destroy the North Korean army.
Neither can an American reporter, Marguerite Higgins (Megan Fox) embedded at HQ and privy to the particulars of the attack. The CO (Robert Eads) she gets her scoops from tells her to “keep your bags packed.” If this attack, and then MacArthur’s fail, the North Koreans will finish overrunning the country.
There’s talk of spies everywhere in this newly-independent, newly-divided country. “Battle of Jangsari” reminds us that this may have been a Cold War “test” between the US and Russia and China. But in Korea, it was brother against brother, cousin against cousin — personal and bloody and bitter.
There’s promise of air support and a naval bombardment. But mere radio contact is hard to maintain en route. Captain Lee knows its all on them and trots out the “Can you exist without a country?” pep talk. The boys are fired up, if not exactly “ready” for all this.
The first big act of sacrifice is when the ship’s captain is convinced to run his vessel aground rather than let the troops be slaughtered on their way to shore in the few tiny inflatables they’ve been alloted for this attack.
Just getting to the beach is as nightmarish as every resisted beach assault in history, “Iwo Jima” awful.
And once there, the carnage doesn’t let up. We’re treated to a truncated version of “The Longest Day” as the Captain and an enterprising sergeant or two strategize, improvise and give their young charges a fighting chance.
The uniforms are different, but so much of what’s shown here will be familiar to anybody who’s ever seen a combat film. Grunts boast of their sharpshooting prowess, curse and bully each other and make clumsy mistakes the way kids who have never held a rifle before 10 days do.
There’s more weeping than your average American war movie, and a little hand-holding. The Captain administers corporal punishment, at one point.
One of the recruits, the one who can recall his “northern accent,” is Choi Sung-pil (Choi Min-ho), a refugee from the north. Some don’t trust his loyalty, but the Captain leans on him to fool North Korean patrols when he leads a foraging party into the nearby town.
“Are you guys butchering that dog? Could you share?”
Relax, ASPCA fans.
The fighting? In your face, gory, with action broken up into groups of two, three or four, comrades saving each other, or failing to. We get back stories from the plump private who worries about the lack of food, from the bully with a sad back story that explains his bullying, a sad story that will change “when I come back home a hero.”
Yes, some of the cast is fleshed out with K-Pop stars turned actors, just as in Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.”
And then there’s the whole “suicide mission” that the pushy American reporter keeps throwing at American and Korean brass. They’re under-equipped and under-supplied, with no prospect of evactuation, resupply or reinforcement, with only a badgering journalist to appeal to the conscience of HQ.
There are some grand action sequences, an “ambush” built on a ballsy bit of bluffing from a sergeant (Kim In-Kwon) who’d be right at home in a John Wayne movie.
And it’s striking how much the real Korea looks like the one most Americans have seen in reruns of the movie or TV series “M*A*S*H” — shot in Southern California.
There’s little here that any Westerner who’s seen a few combat films won’t recognize. The effects and production values (convincing digital transport ships) are pretty good, of a Hollywood B-picture caliber (a film like the Nicolas Cage thriller “U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage”).
“Jangsari” is immersive and involving, the way the best combats are, and jjust Korean enough to make us appreciate the differences between cultures and alternate views of the history of the war. Sometimes, the country known for coining the phrase, “the cavalry comes to the rescue” doesn’t live up to that.
That’s a message that speaks to audiences in modern Korea and present day America just as loudly.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Kim Myung-Min, Cjhoi Min-Ho, Kim Sung-cheol, Kwak Si-EYang, Lee Jae-Wook Lee, Megan Fox and George Eads.
Credits: Directed by Kyung-taek Kwak. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:45
British to a “T,” and so twee you’d swear Wes Anderson had a hand in it, “Sometimes Always Never” makes for a perfectly wistful Billy Nighy star vehicle.
It’s so soft spoken and so little happens in this story of the emptiness brought on by loss, fine tailoring and Scrabble that you might miss its whimsy. But it’s there, blended in delicate proportions with the bittersweet.
The sartorially celebrated Nighy plays a quietly-obsessed Scrabble-hustling tailor in “Sometimes Always Never,” a man we meet on a lonely beach, waiting for his son.
Sam Riley (“Pride and Prejudice and and Zombies”) is that son, Peter. Peter’s not quite as buttoned-down as his dad, but neither is all that demonstrative. Peter, the composer of commercial jingles, takes the wheel of Dad’s immaculately-kept vintage Triumph Herald convertible and motors down the coast to the town where they have an appointment.
Government austerity means the office they’ve been called to is closed, but father Allen ( has anticipated that. He’s booked them a room at The Royce, a B & B. He’s methodical, meticulous and fastidious, as you might expect from a man in his profession.
And he’s comfortable with every one of those synonyms, because he is, in American parlance, a word freak. He’s deep into Scrabble.
We aren’t so much told this as we quickly figure it out as he play-acts his way into a hustle at The Royce. It begins when he asks for the Muzak to be turned down.
“I always say, ‘The only good thing about ‘jazz’ is that it scores very highly in Scrabble!”
That prompts a correction from a husband (Tim McInnerney of “Notting Hill”) Arthur, who soon suggests a game to Allen and Arthur’s wife (Jenny Agutter of “An American Werewolf in London”). When Margaret isn’t listening, Arthur proposes that “we make” the game “interesting.”
But it’s only after the hustle is set in motion that Allen figures out they they’re here for the same reason as he and Peter. They’ve been called to identify a body. Their 19 year-old son went missing. Allen’s did, too, some years before.
Whatever the loss of his brother did to Peter — and the uncertainty of his fate is grasped as a last straw — Allen seems lost, embracing the distraction of Scrabble, online mostly. He goes on and on about words, strategies, big-scoring plays and the “101 two letter words” in the English dictionary, because “two letter words are your friends.”
He prattles on to Peter’s wife, Sue (Alice Rowe) and their son (Louis Healy) after passive-aggressively inviting himself to stay with them. He’s full of useless trivia about the reasons Canada doesn’t allow the import of a certain vile English spread for toast.
“The people of Canada,” and all their vast land mass, “don’t have Marmite!”
“How DO they get by?” Sue plays along.
“Vegemite,” Allen says, weighed down with resignation. “Poor substitute.”
That’s the tenor of the humor here — subtle. Words matter to Allen, and they come to matter to his role-playing game-addict grandson. Before we know it, young Jack is correcting his mother’s use of how “inconvenient” it is to have his granddad sleeping in his room. No, it’s “disquieting, disorientating, awkward, destabilizing, unsettling…”
And that’s accompanied by dapper Allen giving a makeover to the kid, making him “spruce” enough to tickle the kid’s girlfriend (Ella-Grace Gregoire).
The mystery at its heart doesn’t so much drive this story as chases that missing-son from a B & B to a marina, never quite achieving closure. It’s based on a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the British screenwriter of “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” “Millions” (for Danny Boyle) and many Michael Winterbottom films such as “Welcome to Sarejevo” and “24 Hour Party People.”
Director Carl Hunter cut his teeth on British documentaries, and seems ill-suited for the material — leaving laughs on the table like a poker player lacking nerve. The central relationship wanders off screen for the middle acts, and for all the minor delights that assorted scenes and the wonderful players hired to perform them (Agutter and Lowe stand out), it isn’t the most coherent story, “mystery” or not.
But Nighy brings so much of himself to Allen that many of those rough, expositional or inconclusive edges are rubbed off, or at least shoved into the background.
Whatever its value to a British audience, “Sometimes Always Never” has enough outside-looking-in charm, and Nighy, to make it nice fit to any Anglophile filmgoer.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some sexual references
Cast: Bill Nighy, Sam Riley, Jenny Agutter, Tim McInernney, Alice Lowe
Credits: Directed by Carl Hunter, script by Frank Cotrell Boyce. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:31
Movie Nation 