“The future is female,” as has been pretty obvious this past year or so.
So let’s put the little kids in their proper order, and give the witch her scary due.
This has a very creepy, classic fairytale of horror feel.
Every January has a break out horror hit, and “Gretel & Hansel” could be the winner of Jan. 21, 2020. We shall see.
It’s become common knowledge, largely thanks to a cartoon that generations of children have seen — “Balto.”
If you walk through Central Park in New York, you can see the well-rubbed (for luck) bronze statue of “Balto” in tribute to the dogs who did the unthinkable back in the 1920s.
No, the dogs didn’t actually talk, but the tale of the Nome, Alaska diptheria outbreak and the town’s rescue by serum delivered in an epic sled dog trek is essentially true.
This version stars Brian Presley, Brad Leland, Treat Williams, Henry Thomas, Brea Bree, and Bruce Davison and opens Oct. 25.
The pithiest review possible for many a movie is a single word — “forgettable.”
Add “instantly” in front of that and you get an idea of the virtues of “Little Boxes.”
It’s soooooo familiar that I know I’ve seen it before, and I NEVER see a movie without taking notes on it and reviewing it. Ok, plainly “ALMOST never” is true.
But nothing from this, and I’m a Melanie Lynskey fan. Just vague recollections of the “oh, yeah” variety as I re-watched it.
The plot elements are weary tropes — New York family moves to a small college town in Washington state and copes with moving company delays, a house with mold, a middle school son (Armani Jackson) taken from “blerd” (black nerd) to sexualized teen by the tweenage tarts down the street, an art faculty at the college where the feminist wife/mom (Melanie Lynskey) which believes in meeting over “a liquid lunch” and an African American writer-husband (Nelsan Ellis) who gets profiled — repeatedly — by the well-meaning “liberal” locals.
The best line is directed at the writer. “If you close your eyes, you can’t even tell he’s black!”
The unkindest cut comes from the too-friendly drama teacher, whose fallopian trio of tenure track drinkers get Lynskey’s Gena — “the new hire” (photography, with a “gender informativity” focus) — sloshed. And then comes the slurred “getting sloppy in a small town” lecture from said dramaturg (Janeane Garofalo).
The kid? His exotic good looks and epic Afro have the little lily white girls (Oona Laurence, ringleader) gushing “We like, TOTALLY needed a black kid…This town is sooo white!”
Director Rob Meyer can’t gin up much comic interest in the slow-motion movie where all these characters and plot elements lope — not “hurtle” — towards that moment when the wheels totally come off.
There’s a funny movie in the “big city sophisticates SHOCKED by the transgressive nonsense that goes on in a small (college) town.” This isn’t it.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, substance abuse (pills, alcohol), sexuality and profanity involving tweens.
Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Nelsan Ellis, Armani Jackson, Oona Laurence, Janeane Garofalo, Veanne Cox and Christine Taylor
Credits: Directed by Rob Meyer, script by Annie J. Howell. A Gunpowder & Sky/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:24
There are moments, scenes and sequences in the documentary “Out of Omaha” that will make your heart hurt.
The seven-years-long portrait of African American twins from the roughest neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska allows you to put yourself in these kids’ shoes in those moments.
Suppose you were blindly and unjustly accused of a crime, that the cops, via Crimestoppers, put your name and face out there, which too-helpful local TV broadcast during the evening news? Suppose this happened more than once?
Forget the fact that the people charged are young, African American men and that this happens in a small city or later, in an even a smaller one, so that strangers on the street will recognize you even after exoneration.
Ignore the reality that the local newspaper and the TV stations that posted your mugshot into living rooms all over the region don’t cover that “charges dropped” part of your story.
How could anybody, much less somebody young and with limited resources (POOR) escape that trap and avoid becoming a self-fulfilling law enforcement-mandated prophecy?
Clay Tweel’s years-in-the-making film is framed within seven years of the life of Darcell Trotter. He is 25 when we first see him, sweeping a floor in 2017. But seven years before, he was a promising kid studying hard, trying to break out of Omaha’s notorious “North Omaha” neighborhood.
Here’s lawyer Wayne Brown, who moved back after escaping a fate chiseled in stone by this phrase.
“My family was in the heroin business.”
Brown is a shining, upper middle class pillar of the community now. But with the siblings and parents who died or went to prison when he was trapped in the red-lined North Omaha neighborhood, a region roiled by protests and violence in the 1960s, buried in poverty, despair and drugs even today, Brown makes the perfect witness to all that will happen to Darcell and the conditions that led to it.
North Omaha “is a six square mile radius that is trapped in 1965.”
Darcell’s dad left the family, a slave to his addictions. Darcell’s twin brother Darrell is more about gang life, “get some money” by any means, “whether it’s hurting somebody or not.”
And here is Darcell, starting school at the University of Nebraska, benefiting from Avenue Scholars, a scholarship and counseling program designed to move people like him out of the gutted dead-end of North Omaha.
What’s the worst that could happen?
“All it takes,” Darcell says, “is for one thing to go wrong, and you’re incarcerated.”
Brown and members of Avenue Scholars talk about the “bad choices” we see Darcell “make” over the next seven years, and invite us to reason out an alternative to those choices, given the poverty, environment, peer and family pressure facing him.
Kids get into selling drugs because that is the neighborhood example, the local industry.
Even if Darcell dodges one pothole, there’s his twin, resigned to stepping right in it. For Darcell, it just takes one night of being in the wrong party with the wrong people at the worst possible time for it all to come apart.
We taste the bitterness of “a dream deferred” in both young men, experience the hope that bubbles up when they leave North Omaha for Grand Island (150 or so miles away) to stay with their father.
Steady work? Sure. But even in Grand Island, where just two percent of the population is African American, the twins get profiled while making appliance deliveries. And that’s just the beginning of their problems.
Everything somebody with a financially stable home life takes for granted, the automatic assumption of innocence, for starters, emergency money to cover a big bill (a lawyer), a support system that can keep you not just out of trouble, but giving you the direction that makes you steer a wide path from it, is missing.
Not every “choice” Darcell makes can be shrugged off or excused. But the real take-away here is the shocking realization of how quickly a young life can be derailed by a “system” that arrests, charges and holds people who are not so much accused as “named” in an incident.
Imagine trying to clear yourself, emptying your pockets and considering selling a little weed just to cover for a lawyer, when all the cops really want is for you to “talk.” Just give them somebody else’s name.
“Out of Omaha” isn’t an American nightmare. There are rays of light and hope that young people like the brothers can be rescued, “break the cycle” as the cliche goes.
But watching this, you will never, ever look at a local news photo of a “Crimestoppers” suspect the same way again.
MPAA Rating: unrated, drug use discussed, profanity
Cast: Darcell Trotter, Darrell Trotter, Barbara Robinson, Wayne Brown, Yano Jones, Aubrey Caballero
Credits: Directed by Clay Tweel, written by Clay Tweel, Tim Grant, Ryan Johnston, Steven Klein, Damien Michael Belliveau. An Imperative Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:37
It’s a gambler-on-a-bender thriller with the Sand-man entangling his family and the family business in his “problem.”
This Safdie Brothers tale co-stars Idina Menzel and The Wkend and…Kevin Garnett?
It made a splash at Toronto and opens Dec. 25.
I’m sorry, if A24 is going to start releasing Adam Sandler thrillers I am going to have to rethink my entire world view. Or Sandler. Or A24.
We remember Caligula and Nero for their Roman depravity. But the two most notorious emperors of ancient Rome seem more timeless when you consider what fed their appetites.
The emptiness of oligarchy and a ruling kleptocracy feels both distinctly Italian and innately universal in “Loro,” Paolo Sorrentino’s film of the latter years of the TV tycoon turned politician Silvio Berlusconi.
For it, Sorrentino (“Youth,” TV’s “The Young Pope”) goes back to his earlier political film “Il Divo,” a fantasia on the twisted career of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti. But he summons up thoughts of “Caligula” and “La Dolce Vita” in the excesses, the emotional remove and timelessly Italian resignation of it all this time around.
The old Italian lecturing idealistic American airmen in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” was onto something. Short-sighted, as easily manipulated by the right demagogue at the right moment as anybody else, Italy will endure this war and this Allied/American “crusade,” the wizened one says with a laugh.
And we Italians never learn, adds Sorrentino, any more than anybody else. That’s why “Loro” feels like a picture from the very recent Italian past that provides a prism to break down the harsh light of the present day world.
What was Berlusconi but a template for Trump, Johnson and the rest?
The title “Loro” is both a literal “them” in the eternal “them vs. us” struggle, and a play on “L’oro,” the Italian word for gold. The gilded corruption and vapidity of those who seek the inside dealing, the financial rewards and sexual favors of the ruling circle frames “Loro,” even if Sorrentino loses track of that, here and there.
In this two-part film compressed into one for non-Italian audiences, we meet Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio), a craven hustler trying to make his mark in Taranto.
He describes himself as “a talent scout,” but what that amounts to is procuring women — including a seemingly compliant “gymnast” — for lecherous old men in positions of power. It’s how he “fixes” a school cafeteria contract for his father’s company in the opening scene. Dad, who “never pays bribes,” is outraged.
“What’s wrong with your father?” a pol wants to know (in Italian, with English subtitles).
“He’s honest and upright.”
That isn’t Sergio. He’s got his eyes on the prize — a prime governmental appointment. To get there, he will use the “gymnast” and others he procures to get close to Kira (Kasia Smutniak). It doesn’t matter than “She’s meaner than Putin.” She’s his access to Berlusconi. She’s been his mistress.
Oh “him,” she says, being coy?
“HIM him…You don’t know what I’d give to meet ‘Him.'”
But Sergio’s story takes a back seat when Silvio himself shows up. Toni Servillo of “Gomorrah,” and Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” and “The Great Beauty” makes Berlusconi a riveting presence, larger than life, a media mogul who insists to his fellow Italians on his “self-made” status, when in reality his father loaned him “millions” to get him on the road to being Europe’s answer to Rupert Murdoch.
Yes, that sounds familiar.
His onetime trophy wife, Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) has been with him long enough to know the truth, that the pasted-on smile, perma-tan and ostentatious displays of wealth are the shimmering gilding on a vapid lump.
Berlusconi is out of power at the moment, and not content to flit from mansion to mansion, superyacht to superyacht while the masses watch his TV networks’ game shows, his version of “bread and circuses.”
His cronies want to get back in the game and back in the money. Use your charm, your promises and whatever to “turn” several senators and “bring down the government.”
He has a chance because he is gregarious and charming, but also slippery and ruthless, a man of vast resources. And he understands the men in this man’s world.
“Men are slaves to infantile temptations…They do not see the future.”
The fifty shades of empty sexual exploits of the gaggle of gargoyles beholden to Berlusconi demonstrate that here. One encounter borders on rape. He knows his cronies well.
Sergio’s “access” is based on talent procurement, supplying legions of pliable young women to be Silvio’s audience as he leads them in sing-alongs, trots out his magnetism at baccanales that he doesn’t so much host or organize as preside over. The dirty work, traceable as it is, is left to others.
When pundits speak of Donald Trump “not wanting to govern” (a common jab at Berlusconi), but merely angling, conniving and looting to be a part of this one percent of the one percent, oligarchs sealed off from the world, showing “the common touch” when they want to be worshipped, Berlusconi is the role model such men have in mind.
Sorrentino lets Veronica score points about how gauche and unproductive her husband of 20 years is (he is 70, she just turned 50). When a would-be young conquest (Alice Pagani) wholly aware of why she’s been summoned to this party, speaks of him having “my grandfather’s breath,” the man looks as ridiculous as any shriveled mogul with a pole-dancing coed holding up his ancient arm.
But on the whole, Berlusconi gets off easily here, his Weinstein-esque sexual predations played down. Yes, he likes his models scantily clad, dancing and acting-out lesbian makeout fantasies.
The women come off, if anything, worse. The system, the Church and the culture have reduced them to this, limited in their path to power and wealth. So they submit to being “procured.”
“He’s not as short as they say,” one rationalizes.
“He drives me mad when he dresses like an admiral!” another coos.
“Loro” is fictionalized and very “inside baseball,” so a non-Italian will not know which Bond-villain attired aide or faded gigolo is being depicted (many names were changed). Editing the two films that made up the release in Italy makes this feel ungainly, muting the impact of a bracing return-to-power/greeted by an Earthquake finale.
It’s a lush fantasy version of Berlusconi and his bubble world, the gold-plated “them” of the title — “Loro.” That’s a recipe for leaving the viewer visually and informationally overwhelmed.
And the framing device, hapless Sergio and his recruited “talent,” leaves us craving closure. In a thriller he is Sammy Glick from “What Makes Sammy Run?” He’s the wronged striver who, in the third act, pulls the trigger.
That never happened, or hasn’t yet. Berlusconi is now 82 and still in “the game.” So “closure” will have to wait until the “next” revolution.
MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual violence
Cast: Toni Servillo, Elena Sofia Ricci, Kasia Smutniak, Alice Pagani and Riccardo Scamarcio
Credits: Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, script by Paolo Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello. An IFC release.
Running time: 2:35
The chatty bellhop doesn’t know. All that chatter is what keeps him from figuring it out, reading the signs.
Because heaven knows we have. It was in the evasive conversation Holly (Claire Forlani) had with “Russell” on her way to the hotel, the “conference” that was really more a consultation.
It was in the flinch she gave the desk clerk when he called her “Mrs. Allen,” and mentioned “Mr. Allen” has already checked in to the suite.
Holly’s there to cheat. Twenty-one years of marriage or not, this is her weekend getaway with Mr. Not-Her-Husband.
The computer print out notes he’s left her in the room, the sexy undies and uh, handcuffs and BLINDfold in the box? Good times to come.
Only they don’t, not when it’s “An Affair to Die For.”
This cleverly plotted and aesthetically streamlined thriller puts two cheaters in a hotel suite, blackmailed by a spouse who tells the cheating man that he has his “family” so he’d better not tell, and he’d better not let the blackmailer’s spouse out of that room.
Or ELSE.
“I will KILL your family, starting with your beautiful wife, Lydia. What do you think about that, Lydia?”
A muffled scream in the background seems to confirm it.
The spouse? The blackmailer tells her she needs to GET OUT of that room, that she doesn’t know what manner of monster she’s been hooking up with these past several months.
Everett (Jake Abel) is handsome, sure. Younger. But FEAR him, husband Russell (veteran screen heavy Titus Welliver) hisses into the phone. “GET OUT.”
So there’s no faulting the set-up here. Two people with honesty and trust issues, each in the dark about the other’s motives, about to engage in a battle of wits to satisfy their competing agendas.
Sweet talking, oozing charm, trying to figure out if the balcony is something one can escape from, hoping to get a clue as to how Mr. Cuckolded knows what they do the minute that they do it.
Paranoia and tension rising, walls closing in, the ante being upped. The cutting remarks start.
“You were always the more ADVEN-turous one!
But much of that promise and a pretty good cast — Forlani was in “Meet Joe Black” and other big studio pictures back in the ’90s, Abel was in “Love & Mercy,” playing Beach Boys lead-jerk Mike Love, Welliver’s been in everything, from “Law and Order” to “Argo” and “Shaft”) — is frittered away in a movie that generates little empathy and zero suspense.
It’s only 82 minutes long, but it doesn’t feel brisk. The stakes start out plenty high, but the players don’t give a hint of the panic that they’re supposedly trying to hide.
And the resolution is a third act cop-out.
If this screenplay hasn’t been test-run in the theater, it should be. It might make a good stage thriller, with some tweaks. The dialogue lacks punch, the competing agenda “incidents” need to be amped up — one trying to escape, the other desperate to do whatever awful thing it takes to save his family.
This “Affair,” as it stands, is nothing to die for, or even catch a cold over. The execution here, bland direction (a veteran of “The Mirror 2” behind the camera), colorless dialogue and performances pitched as almost mild-mannered (save for Welliver) earn this one a bored shrug.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sexual violence
Cast: Claire Forlani, Titus Welliver, Jake Abel, Nathan Cooper.
Credits: Directed by Victor Garciá, script by Elliot Sand. An Aqute Media/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:22
Dreamworks’ “Abominable,” not to be confused with Sony’s “Smallfoot” or Laika’s “Missing Link,” is an animated Chinese travelogue that tugs at the heartstrings.
That’s pretty much in lieu of laughs in this fluffy twist on a fantastic beasts and the land of wonders where you find them — Tibet, er, China.
Humor is in such short supply — four chuckles, tops — that you notice things like how the creature doesn’t look like a photo-real Yeti, or abominable snowman. He looks exactly like an animated plush toy.
And then there’s the story, which has a heroic, violin-playing Chinese teen (voiced by Chloe Bennet for English speaking audiences) and her two cousins trying to save the first-ever Yeti specimen captured from the people who captured him.
That would be an obsessed, aged British explorer (Eddie Izzard) and the scientist, apparently American, who did the actual capturing (Sarah Paulson).
The fact that the creature’s humming, which he does as he is about to do something “E.T.” magical, is unmistakably the tone of a Tibetan Monk’s Moan, “throat singing,” is a last bit of eyebrow raising detail.
So Dreamworks has made a movie designed to sell a plush toy and pander to not just the Chinese movie marketplace, but a Chinese worldview — anti-Western, with a dash ot Tibetan cultural (and territorial) appropriation.
The “just a kids’ cartoon” tale is about Yi (Bennet, of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D”), who lives with her mother (Michelle Wong) and Nai Nai (grandmother, voiced by Tsai Chin). She’s a loner, working odd jobs for extra cash after school, not fitting in with her cell-phone-and-fashion-obsessed peers, who include her vain cousin Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor of TV’s” Liv and Maddie”).
Yi’s Me Space is the roof of the apartment building where they all, and younger cousin Peng (Albert Tsai) live. It’s where she stashes her cash, saving for “my big trip across China,” and the post card collection her late father left her. It’s where she plays mournful Chinese folk melodies on the violin he left her.
Then this beast gets out of a vast containment facility and private soldiers with all the gear of an over-equipped police force set out to capture it. But Yi is the one who finds it — “him” — who, she gathers through visual cues, comes from Mount Everest.
Yi backs into the idea of taking him home, taking that “big trip” a lot sooner than she expected.
The cities are neon-and-LED lit metropolises, the rivers, forests and Gobi desert are pretty, if somewhat computer-animated generic, and the giant mountainside Buddha is the Leshan Buddha, a real bucket-list travel destination.
The jokes are of the slapstick variety — belches and vomit and mud and what not.
And lest one think this is just Chinese agitprop, with a Western conspiracy to snatch a Yeti from his natural home — Tibet, which has been occupied by China since the 1950s — there are subversive touches.
The police state nature of the villains’ minions suggest more than a mere private contractor, the joke about keeping a truck driver quiet after a Yeti road accident — “It’s a bribe.” — hints at corruption.
That unmistakable Tibetan monk moan, and casting an ethnic Tibetan (Trainor is the grandson of the Tibetan who was with Sir Edmund Hillary when he was the first to summit Mount Everest) as one of the voices are digs that won’t be repeated in the People’s Republic version of the movie.
“Abominable” isn’t a bad film, and the Chinese violin renders some moments quite touching. But it is dull and some of that comes from the similar animated films that beat it to market over the past year.
And some of it is the result of a script that has too little to it — too little originality, too few incidents, virtually no jokes.
MPAA Rating: PG for some action and mild rude humor
Voice Cast: Chloe Bennett, Albert Tsai, Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Eddie Izzard, Sarah Paulson and James Hong
Credits: Directed by Jill Culton, Todd Wilderman, script by Jill Culton. A Dreamworks/Universal release.
Running time: 1:37
The drawl, the shock of unruly white hair and scraggly beard can lead to the wrong first impression of Jim Allison.
Learning that this Texan, a lifelong blues harp player and committed Willie Nelson fan, has been known to close down his share of honky tonks cements it.
This “sumbitch,” as they say down yonder, is “Just another Texas s—kicker.”
But this salty Texan has fought his share of battles over Creationism intruding into the state’s science curriculum. This UT alumnus has run experiments in labs from Austin to Berkeley to the Scripps Institite.
This s–tkicker has a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. That’s because this sumbitch has come up with a cure for cancer.
“Jim Allison: Breakthrough” tracks Allison’s long career and his solitary path from research to immunotherapy drugs that in many patients, cure cancer.
The film is a portait in dogeddness and going against the current thinking in cancer treatment and research.
Allison lost his mother to cancer, and a family predisposition to the disease helped drive him.
“You ought to at least do something that helps people.”
As he immersed himself in the world of the newly-discovered (while he was in college) “T-cell” antibodies the human body uses to fight disease, and turned that research towards getting T-cells to fight tumors, he was swimming against a flood and the tide of cancer treatment history.
“Breakthrough” reminds us of another big “cure for cancer” using the immune system. Interferon wasn’t a complete bust, but the 1980s “cure” was a significant letdown, in terms of what was promised and what actually resulted.
Still, Allison pushed on, challenging other research, sticking with immunotherapy at the T-cell receptor (molecular) level. He is an iconoclast, colleagues — some of them competitors — say. “Stubborn” is a word they avoid. Not that his brother Murphy does.
“Diamond Head” he was nicknamed, Murphy Allison jokes. Jim’s skull is “the hardest substance known to man.”
He had to be hard-headed. One of Allison’s scientific peers from the world of “peer reviewed science” marvels that “the skepticism was widespread, and Jim experienced it every day.”
That didn’t stop when he and his colleagues had their breakthrough. He had to then turn over his life to finding a company to polish the discovery of something that worked in cancerous mice into a drug fit for human trial. He had to convince Big Pharma to get behind a corner of the field that they had been leery of since Interferon.
Documentarian Bill Haney (“The Price of Sugar”) also tells the story of Sharon Belvin, diagnosed with melanoma at 22, and one of the first people to benefit from the unusually long clinical trial it took for Allison’s “breakthrough” to show results. Her story adds flesh and blood to the cold chalkboard science.
And as a sidebar, Haney — through narrator Woody Harrelson and others — recalls Allison’s early efforts to fend off the intrusion of non-scientific “Creation Science” from being introduced into the Texas curriculum.
The flinty Allison’s blunt, dispassionate take-down could be a model for a two sentence end to that debate.
The film’s third act tracks patient-Blevin’s experiences and the history of Ipilimumab, the antibody Allison’s work developed and got to market — a near-run thing that took years and years.
Some cancer patients survived long enough to have it there for them in their darkest hour. Others did not. The film isn’t great at building suspense, and like the FDA approval process it summarizes, hits a point where it drags a bit.
And whatever the thrills of a call from Sweden might bring, the fact that Woody Harrelson narrates this and Willie Nelson has been mentioned should tip you to a Big Moment that surpasses the Nobel in the finale.
Did I mention Allison’s from Texas?
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language.
Cast: Jim Allison, Sharon Belvin, Dr. Jedd Wolchock, Malinda Allison, Dr. Max Krummel, Eric Benson, Andrew Pollack, narrated by Woody Harrelson
Credits: Directed by Bill Haney. A Dada Films release.
Running time: 1:29
I laid out a couple of ideas for places to take the high toned soap opera in my review of “Downton Abbey: The Movie.” Now the production team is saying they hope they get another shot at this story, these characters, that Abbey.
I could totally see that happening, and the current film certainly hints at a changing of the guard.
A $31-33 million opening weekend certainly makes that much more likely.
The two ideas from my review? The Great Depression, or move the story forward to World War II.
As Simon Jones, who plays George V in “The Movie,” was in “Brideshead Revisited,” the template British soap opera on which “Downton” is based, and “Brideshead Revisited” is framed within a great estate serving new purposes in World War II, that would make this a nice, neat circle of posh TV soaps with great casts and vast audiences.
Movie Nation 