The buzz is that A24 has itself the scariest movie of the summer. Early summer, late summer or…”MIDsommar.”
A little “Season of the Witch” with cultish Swedes (Hey Bergman died, ABBA got old and SAAB stopped making cars — they’ve got to do something to stem that Midnight Sun fever).
Scarier that a haunted doll? Scarier than “Chucky,” at least, is my guess.
My review of “Annabelle Comes Home” posts at 5 eastern. So we will just have to see.
Not my favorite Miyazaki, but a fun fact…noted by Variety
“China Box Office: ‘Toy Story 4’ Beaten by Old Animated Film ‘Spirited Away’” https://t.co/Pld48hFiep https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1143097958780604417?s=17
Those $140 to as high as $200 million opening weekend predictions for the pointless anti-climactic “Toy Story 4” proved to be our collective reach f a pie the sky. Disney Pixar, which as Deadline.com points out, normally opens it’s summer moves on Father’s Day, waited a week and saw that decision blow up in their faces.
As I said in my review, there’s nothing in this sequel that we haven’t seen before, funnier and more touchingly rendered in three earlier films. Audiences suspected as much. No best Pixar opening ever, no second best Pixar opening ever. Adjusted for inflation, this is underwhelming even by “Toy Story” standards.
Another brand name franchise showing itself out of date was the “Child’s Play” reboot. $18 miion projected, a million Mark Hamill and Aubrey Plaza promotional interviews and it barely cleared $14.
“Aladdin” keeps making money. “Anna” did not.
A Luc Besson bust, with or without “MeToo” blowback over rape and harassment charges.
We take these critters seriously in the Too Much Sunshine State.
And when we don’t, our obit makes the news. July 12, gator luggage starts sounding like a good idea.
A kidnapping’s viral infection of an extended family through its intertwined history, gossip and the secrets “Everybody Knows” is the focus of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s latest drama.
It’s an intimate melodrama of tightly wound performances depicting conflicted relationships between people traumatized by shock, but too wrapped-up in old grudges to not have their suspicions.
The director of “The Salesman” and “The Past” takes his time unraveling the mystery that drives the plot. But that allows a stellar cast headed by husband-and-wife Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and the terrific Argentinian Ricardo Darín and dazzling and new-to-most-of-us Spaniard Bárbara Lennie to simmer, suffer, lash out and explode under the pressure that this harrowing situation puts them all in.
Laura (Cruz) has returned to the town (Torrelaguna, north of Madrid) of her youth for a cousin’s wedding. She’s brought her little boy and teenage daughter, Irene, with her from Argentina, where they now live.
We see Irene (Carla Campra) take on a little “wild child cut loose” behavior, hurtling helmetless on cousin Felipe’s moped, drinking and smoking, letting him steal a kiss in clock tower of the village’s ancient church.
Just like her parents, Felipe (Sergio Castellanos) says, pointing out the carved initials of her mother’s name and that of her adolescent love, Paco. It’s one of those secrets in town that “todos lo saben” — “Everybody Knows.”
The power goes out, mid-revel, on the night of the wedding. And that’s when Irene is taken, by kidnappers who have taken the time to deposit clippings of a previous kidnapping that didn’t end well as a warning.
Laura falls apart, wailing in the streets.
“Do something,” she cries (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “I beg of you!”
Paco (Bardem) springs into action. But he is out of his depth, and following the “Don’t tell the police or else” edict of the kidnappers, he doesn’t know what to do.
Nor does anybody else. So they all start asking questions, accusing first Paco’s vineyard workers, then his wife Bea’s “last chance” tech school students.
Why didn’t Laura’s husband, Alejandro (Darín) make the trip with her?
And then, there’s the tortured history of Paco’s “estate,” the vineyard he bought from Laura’s family, on the cheap, long ago. Old grudges die hard, memories of bad business deals die harder.
Farhadi keeps the focus on the two families — Laura’s, where her helpful uncle (Eduard Fernández) finds an ex-cop (José Ángel Egido) they can confide in, who opens several cans of worms; and Paco and his wife Bea (Lennie, fierce), who asks even tougher questions and suggests conspiracies at every turn.
The grace notes of the picture are the sunbaked Spanish locations and the characters wholly inhabiting them. Bardem plays Paco as “the fun uncle,” a man with a huge laugh, a ready smile for the ladies and the life of the wedding party when he’s in his (wine) cups.
He’s a Zorba-sized bon vivant, at times, and that’s a hint. If you ever remake “Zorba the Greek,” Bardem is your man.
Cruz’s Laura suffers and comes to pieces in the most realistic ways. Watch her fall utterly apart phoning Alejandro with the news.
Darín, of “The Secret in Their Eyes,” holds his own in this illustrious, Oscar winning company, playing a man suspected by others and humiliated at the parts of his life that it turns out, “Everybody Knows.”
Ransom demands, the amateur “investigation” that Paco and Fernando try to mount, all that is mere window dressing for a movie that is more interested in the fissures that this horror has opened old wounds made fresh by the stress, fractures in family and friends as most everybody starts to suspect “inside job.”
Farhadi breaks his self-imposed format of confining the film to the family, letting us know only what they know, in the third act. But he never abandons the mostly static shots that capture simmering stillness of the acting, with only a little drone-footage of the wedding reception enlivening the visuals.
Frankly, “Everybody Knows” plays like the smartest, subtlest Spanish soap opera ever and could have done with a little more sizzle — more attention to the mystery, maybe a brisker pace.
It’s still a fine showcase for great acting, a great setting and a pretty good, if not great yarn unraveling the social fabric of a family, its history and the ugly secrets “Everybody Knows” but nobody has talked about — until now.
MPAA Rating: R for some language
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darín, Bárbara Lennie, Carla Campra
Credits: Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 2:12
An old guys” action comedy, this one has the “Is Netflix making this?”feel. Older audiences haven’t been showing up for these guys in so called “geezer comedies.” Via The Hollywood Reporter
“The action comedy ‘The Comeback Trail’ – starring #RobertDeNiro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones – had just added another star to its cast”
https://t.co/0neGdqTkBJ https://t.co/EtkdFV7NZa https://twitter.com/THR/status/1142352548252266496?s=17
Heady projections from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and even Disney itself that “Toy Story 4” would rewrite the animated movie opening weekend records appear to have been exaggerated.
“Blowing away the ‘Incredibles 2’ opening weekend record” is all but gone with the um, wind.
Keeping in mind Deadline.com’s notorious under estimating of Saturday grosses for kid films, it’s on track now — after a $51 million Friday with $12 million Thursday night paid previews — to fall short of the low end of expectations. As in $136 million, not $140, $150 or $200 million.
It could still clear Disney’s reported tracking of $140 million with a great Sat. And Sunday. But maybe another sequel is set to underwhelm…at least in terms of what was hoped for.
I have seen some rapturous reviews for it among the “98 percent fresh” listed on Rottentomatoes.
But asking around among critic friends and scanning the more selective (established critics) and nuanced Metacritic, I’m seeing more reviews closer to my own “anticlimactic” take. They finished this series nine years ago and should have let it be.
“Child’s Play” has been rebooted with an eye toward making evil doll Chucky more of an allegory about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
Great. They just left out suspense and laughs. Weak reviews won’t kill a horror franchise, but $15 is less than the projected $18 it was supposed to open with.
“Men in Black” is fading as fast as “Godzilla” and the other busts of summer.
Luc Besson’s latest variation of his “La Femme Nikita” and “Leon:The Professional” plot “Anna” is a flop. Under $4. #LucToo had something to do with it.
That WAS Bryan Singer. Now here’s the new one. From the LA Times…
“The long-delayed ‘Red Sonja’ reboot will be written and directed by “Transparent” showrunner Jill Soloway, who will replace Bryan Singer on the project.”
https://t.co/QyET3ekL8k https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1142180406311231490?s=17
There’s warmth and a delightfully prickly edge every time James Caan and Tom Hollander square off in the Holy Land in the dramedy “Holy Lands.”
Harry (Caan) is a salty New York Jew who has relocated to Israel to raise pigs. Moshe (Hollander) is an Orthodox rabbi, teacher and Harry’s neighbor, and deeply offended by this.
They have exchanged unpleasant letters — “degenerate” to self-righteous religious crank. Moshe tried to yell at Harry in person, but can’t even let himself ring the man’s doorbell (He uses his jacketed elbow), trips on his property and harangues his wife, “Scrub scrub…(We’re) never going to get this pig off me.”
And then they meet.
Moshe — “Nice to meet you.”
Harry — “I’m not here to be nice.”
Moshe — “Why don’t you cleanse yourself and stop humiliating us all with your DISGUSTING animals?”
Harry — “Cleanse MYself? Get rid of the stupid beard and the (bleeping) hat and the coat when it’s 98 degrees in the shade!”
Harry could have “played golf like everybody else” in his retirement, as his son (Jonathan Rhys-Myers) writes. But no.
And writer-director Amanda Sthers could have kept the focus on this conflict, with pigs and people and religion in conflict with the religious and the secular.
Harry runs the only pig farm in Israel, for obvious reasons, and “Israeli Jews are gorging themselves on bacon, and I am the man providing it!”
But Sthers gets lost in the playwright-son’s story. He’s turning the letters to and from his father into plays. Sthers gives us a heavy dose of the daughter’s dilemma, refusing to grow up. And she throws in melodrama with the ex-wife.
None of which are interesting enough to leave Israel and Harry and Moshe for. Harry’s also run afoul of a local Christian sect, and as he’s had to hand-feed a piglet who becomes a pet, the pig becomes a magnet for Moshe’s critter-loving youngest kid.
He’s come here to stick a finger in the eye of the Palestinian conflict, where as he points out to Moshe, Israeli Jews were putting bags of blood on buses to keep Islamic suicide bombers from blowing them up (All of the victims would be “unclean.”).
And maybe his move was a symbolic rending of his garments in the ancient tradition, estranged from his gay playwright son, almost estranged from his ex-wife (Rosanna Arquette) and powerless to fix whatever’s gone wrong with his 34 year-old photographer/daughter (Efrat Dor) who never got over a trauma in her past, and never matured into a life of work and marriage.
“Holy Lands” works when Harry and Moshe are bickering, and doesn’t quite work anytime they’re not on the screen. From daughter Annabelle’s debate over Israeli “wall” politics with a female soldier to her chance romantic encounter with a stranger in an air raid shelter to son David’s vague struggles to Monica the ex-wife’s trials, they’re all peripheral characters in scenes that are inferior entertainment to what Caan and Hollander deliver.
And then there’s the offensive content. The country’s Muslim population is discussed but never seen. Moshe gets to give a succinct defense for not eating pork, but later the rabbi has the temerity to claim “The Palestinians are a proud people, but they seek to recover something that is long dead — the past.”
Oh? How is there an Israel today where there wasn’t one 100 years ago, and more importantly “Why” is there an Israel today when there wasn’t one 100 years ago? A “proud people” seeking to “recover…the past,” you think?
Don’t get me started on how the film treats the Christian sect, whose humorless priest gets his back up after refusing a drink, which Harry says lets him “defy the (drunken priest) stereotype.”
“You amuse yourself by mocking your religion?”
Yeah, Moshe cracking “Stay away from the church. They’re try to crucify you…or CONVERT you!” is funny.
But making the Christians and their assertion that “God…has asked you to leave” the fanatics, doesn’t seem cricket. In an Apartheid state riven by conflict and age-old hatred, terrorism and reprisals it is the Christians who are the unreasonable and violent ones?
We’ve never had much of a chance to see Caan in an overtly Jewish role (he is Jewish), so give me more “COME to Shabbat dinner!” And “Shabbat THIS!”
Let the feuding neighbors bond over reggae, as the rest of the world does (“Many Rivers to Cross”) in a car ride sing-along.
Leave in the ex wife’s “You are the Larry Flynt of the Middle East..a pig pornographer.”
But most of what we see in New York and Brussels (where daughter Annabelle is burning through Daddy’s cash) is wasted screen time.
If you don’t have time enough to show everybody offended by the idea of a pig farm in Israel (a Muslim doesn’t want his phone line crossing the farm), a deliciously promising direction to take the story, you don’t have time for Central Park filler.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity and some violence
Cast: James Caan, Tom Hollander, Rosanna Arquette, Efrat Dor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.
Credits: Written and directed by Amanda Sthers. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:40
Movie Nation 