This is the fifth Disney production of the year to clear that mark.
Try real hard and you will remember the titles, if not the forgettable movies.
Disney is tje only studio to ever manage this. https://t.co/HBv66cDHWr https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1162043973591941126?s=17
Damn, this looks…disturbing. “Chained for Life” opens Sept.13.
An attractive young cast filled with Broadway up-and-comers isn’t enough to spark the neo-noir murder mystery “Seaside” to life.
A drab, mostly-sterile affair, it takes on a “Pretty people in a pretty setting in search of suspense” vibe and never really shakes it.
But like a lot of movies in this low-budget price range, there’s enough here to justify making it, even if the execution is off.
Police tape on an Oregon beach opens the film, so we know somebody’s going to get it. But who, and who will do it?
Ariana DeBose, a girlish, winsome presence cast in Spielberg’s upcoming “West Side Story,” stars as Daphne, a 24 year-old in a dead-end job trying to care for her broke and out of work mother (Sharon Washington).
They’re one Wells Fargo mortgage notice away from losing their house.
But Daphne has a secret she’s keeping from Momma. Daphne sneaks out and sees an old flame, Roger (Matt Shingledecker). Roger’s helping care for an aged father.
And then Dad dies. No more sneaking into Roger’s room after hours.
“You can go out the front door now…We’re free.”
For a guy who’s just lost a parent, Roger is downright giddy. He sasses his late father’s lawyer (Jana Lee Hamblin) when he drags Daphne in for the reading of the will. Law lady may have been the old man’s lover, at one time. She’s there to pop the kid’s bubble.
“Bar-tending while you’re waiting for your inheritance is not a career.”
Roger gets the beach house in tony Seaside, and nothing else. His heirs — should he marry and father a child — get it all.
So that’s what Daphne meant when she corrected her beau’s misuse of African American slang.
“Just stick to your rich stoner white boy talk.”
He’s rich. He’s “Let’s get married!” impulsive. And Daphne? We don’t see her using the toilet for nothing. She gives that birth control dispenser a good, hard look on the counter.
A trip to that beach house, a testy encounter with one of Roger’s exes (Steffanie Leigh) and all we have to guess is who is going to wind up a corpse behind that beachside police tape, and who or what put them there.
The muted color palette and minimalist, downbeat score contribute to the monotony of this potentially-intriguing thriller.
Because those production elements match the underplayed performances. A drunken shout here, a glower there, that’s all “Seaside” writer-director Sam Zalutsky gives us for fireworks.
Everything, from sex scenes to phone arguments to a police investigation, floats along on the same enervated plane. Scheming? Sure. But watch “The Postman Always Rings Twice” — either version. There’s got to be some heat somewhere, some rage, paranoid panic.
The tempo of unfolding events needs to quicken to pull the viewer in, but we’re treated to so much wasted time — shots of walking, driving, thinking — that slow the pace to a crawl.
The wedding scene, in which the happy couple buy the proper gown and tux and then show up in a church, with no appointment and no paperwork, is laughable but has the spark of tetchy life to it.
“We’re ready for business…
“Can I see your license?”
“We’re in love. Isn’t that enough?”
Who, even in his or her early 20s, doesn’t KNOW that you need a license?
When Roger says, the wind leaving his sails, that maybe that was “a sign,” we get it. It’s a sign you’re a rich dope. And if Daphne’s supposed to be the cunning one, you’ve got to wonder about her, too.
This plot, with its murderous, sexy love and murder entanglements, can work. This cast might make it come off, when more of them have movie and not mostly stage experience.
But it doesn’t and they don’t and if we wonder who DIDN’T do it, all signs in this mystery point to the script and the fellow who wrote its direction of it.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity
Cast: Ariana DeBose, Matt Shingledecker, Steffanie Leigh, Sharon Washington, Jana Lee Hamblin
Credits: Written and directed by Sam Zalutsky. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:33
“Her” hits “A. I ” with a hint of “Blade Runner.”
Nice break for Mr. Kind. Don’t recognize the starlet he is interacting with.
Looks right, but…
Richard Linklater’s film of “Where’d You Go Bernadette” may offer the great Cate Blanchett a star vehicle she can sink her incisors into. But rather than a meaty meal, it’s a gooey goulash of randomly expressed “feels.”
How convenient of the culture to invent a bit of slang that trivializes and diminishes “feelings” and the search for sentiment, just for this misshapen, unevenly-acted, ineptly-edited star vehicle.
It’s narrated by the heroine’s borderline-insufferable 14 year-old daughter (newcomer Emma Nelson), who warns us that it’s about her mother, Bernadette, who “forgot to see all the good stuff in her life.”
From the mouths of babes, right?
Except the child, “Bee Branch” she is called (short for Balashram, I think) is a classic “unreliable narrator.” Whatever she is in sitcom writer (“Mad About You,” “Arrested Development”) turned novelist Maria Semple’s book, in the film she’s why we don’t let teens serve as psychotherapists.
“The good stuff,” for Mom, is a near-ruined former girl’s reformatory that she and her Microsoft innovator husband (Billy Crudup) have bought and not done nearly enough to convert into a home. It is leaking, a REAL issue in Seattle, and generally falling apart. Hilltop property it may be, but it’s overrun with blackberry brambles, which runs Bernadette afoul of her hyper-involved, committee-forming neighbor (Kristen Wiig, terrific).
The posh Galer Street School where all concerned send their kids may teach Kindergarteners African folk songs to sing for school assemblies, and Bee Branch has mastered the bamboo flute to accompany them. But it’s all Bernadette can do to drop her doted-upon child off at the entrance without getting into a snit with some other lady or privilege there.
Teachers, other parents, she sneers at them all behind her Jackie O. sunglasses and Jaguar steering wheel. Bernadette is a poster child for “misanthropist.”
She’s a manic “design” obsessed insomniac who piles all her prescriptions into a single jar for its aesthetics, who tries to organize her life via an Indian virtual online assistant, “Manjula,” to whom she dictates tirades, confessionals, requests and commands — get me a sign for this, order me a fishing vest, make travel arrangements for three to Antarctica.
Did I mention that this is their little darling’s new-formed heart’s desire for winter break? A family vacation “before the whole thing melts?”
The movie is about the disasters this request sets in motion, even if the child never acknowledges that the apple of Mom’s eye was the one who triggered her.
A Youtube documentary fills in, for Bee Branch and for a curious Bernadette, who Mom “used to be” — an architect, respected by peers (David Paymer, Megan Mullally), revered by her mentor (Laurence Fishburne), a MacArthur Genius Grant winner who…just…stopped.
“Where’d You Go Bernadette” peels away layers of what put our heroine in her current funk, doubles down on her troubles (James Urbaniak plays an unlikely F.B.I. agent) and spitballs a “solution” (Judy Greer is a therapist who diagnoses her, sight-unseen).
All we can be sure of is that at some point, Bernadette will “go.” Eventually. Later. How long IS this damned thing, anyway?
You can love most everybody on a film — “Boyhood” director included — and still cringe at the accident unfolding on the screen before you.
Characters never quite hit “caricature,” but rational behavior and relationships that should have a softening or hardening arc simply change on a dime.
Blanchett takes Bernadette into the darkness and over-the-top, but only her tastiest tirades about neighbor “Audrey and her Flying Monkeys” are funny, only her pithiest commands — “Go. DO. Be!” — have the potential to tickle.
Because Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this is the talkiest, most exposition-heavy “comedy” I’ve seen in ages. I was expecting something maybe a little “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or “Hector and the Search for Happiness” — flawed films where at least the “feels” feels good.
But no.
Crudup, at times, seems to be on the verge of slipping into smirks, as if he’s TED talking himself into a different movie.
Wiig, at least, is on the same page with the tale’s original intent, and her scenes with Blanchett have a nice snap. Greer is wasted in a bland part, a good part is somewhat wasted on the bland Miss Nelson and the whole third act requires more exposition as it gives the movie its abrupt “purpose” and still hath not a laugh in it.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language and drug material
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kristen Wiig, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson, Laurence Fishburne, Judy Greer, James Urbaniak, David Paymer and Megan Mullally.
Credits: Directed by Richard Linklater, script by Holly Gent, Richard Linklater, Vincent Palmo Jr., based on the Maria Semple novel. An Annapurna/United Artists release.
Running time: 1:48
A dying grandpa is feted by his family at a “Living Wake.”
An ocean-loving father dies and becomes part of an artificial “Memorial Reef.”
An environmental Texan checks out the scrub pine forest where she’ll be laid to rest without an expensive coffin or toxic preservatives, a “Green Burial” in “Moondancer Garden.”
A professor who loved spaceflight is sent into orbit in New Mexico, part of the “Space Burials” idea that’s come to fruition after decades of promise.
A dying Silicon Valley engineer bravely faces, with his wife, the toxic cocktail that will end his life “on his terms,” part of the new “Death with Dignity” trend.
And a little boy, dying of cancer, decrees that there be no funeral, but a “Celebration of Life” that includes bouncy houses, snow-cone making, a cookout and fireworks.
Whatever else they can claim as legitimate contributions to the culture, the Baby Boomers can be celebrated for reinventing death and funerals, a point driven home by the poignant HBO Documentary, “Alternative Endings: Six New Ways to Die In America.” It’s shifting attitudes and an overnight sea change in the extravagant, expensive and increasingly disreputable funeral “industry,” changes driven by a generation that has done precious little the way their ancestors always did it.
Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz’s film covers no real new ground, as most of the six segments in their film cover widely reported trends and mimic feature stories we’ve seen on newscasts and news magazines in recent years.
They structure their film from the easiest burial — the father buried at sea has already passed and been cremated — to the most wrenching, and earn their tears the old-fashioned way.
They focus on people facing the end with a dignity and openness that this subject didn’t really allow until recently. It’s still sanitized, in some ways. We see no one wasting away in a nursing home, vegetative and barely cognizant of their surroundings. These are all pioneers who are taking charge of the end, having it their way and getting all that love, in several cases, before they’re dead and can’t appreciate it.
“It’s my death,” Dick Shannon, the engineer says, and he’s taking charge of it. He takes advantage of California’s “assisted” death laws to plan his departure via a prescribed cocktail that he, his wife and close friends will help him mix for him to take when the lung cancer that’s eaten him alive brings him close to the end.
Following the Green Burial of Barbara Jean in Texas with the Celestis missile launch in New Mexico creates the contrast between an environmentally responsible, carbon neutral funeral where friends wash her body and put it in a bio degradable sack with a tree seedling, “a big ask” of friends, Barbara Jean notes, and the polluting, ostentatious and somewhat pointless rocket into orbit burial.
Then you see how delighted friends and family are with the spectacle, the grandkids hearing mom’s glee that “Grandpa Tuna’s an astronaut, now!” It’s downright joyous, and who are we to quibble?
An opening scene, capturing footage at a recent Boston National Funeral Director’s Association convention, is accompanied by graphics showing the nation turning away from metal casket/rent-the-funeral home/hire a preacher funerals that have cost people a fortune for a century, towards cheaper, lower impact cremations.
We also see all the ways funeral homes are adjusting, upscale urns, holographic “last messages” and other up-selling points added to their business as the ground falls away underneath them.
Many such enterprises will fail, we hear. But as cremation costs rise, there’s little reassurance in that. They’re still going to get you coming and going. Maybe not as much.
And if “Alternative Endings” hastens the sea change that takes this stressful, wasteful expense off people’s mind a bit sooner, HBO is doing us all a public service.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Matthew O’Neill, Perri Peltz. An HBO Films release.
Running time: 1:07
Two basic concepts separate the cinema from the theatrical stage.
In movies, filmed video storytelling, the filmmaker decides where the viewer’s focus MUST be. In theater, the viewer gets to make that choice. This actor, or that one, or that bit player having a little fun upstaging the leads, all can draw the eye and, if the director allows it, compete for the viewer’s attention.
And film, unlike most art forms, features utter mastery of time and space. Your locations are limited only by the filmmaker’s imagination. The ability to skip easily back and forth in time is also boundless, thanks to editing.
In the theater? Not so much.
“Last Call” is in indie drama about a suicidal alcoholic who gets a wrong number when trying to reach a help/hotline. The after-hours custodian who answers finds herself inconvenienced, then trapped, then involved and finally committed to this call that may be a despairing man’s last lifeline.
It’s an inherently dramatic situation, with rising suspense, built-in pathos and the “ticking clock” countdown that all good thrillers lean on. It’s also stagey, “theatrical.” It could be dramatized with a stage, two actors, two pools of light and two prop phones. Simple.
Director/co-writer Gavin Michael Booth decided to jazz up that simple set-up in two ways. He shot his two actors — his wife Sarah Booth plays Beth, the working-mom/custodian, co-writer Daved Wilkins is Scott, the drunk on what might be he last bender — in two locations, and in real time. Their separate performances are contained in one, long take.
And he shows them both, all 70-odd minutes worth, on the screen at the same time — split screen.
That tosses “Last Call” into the category of novelty films, stunts. Like Hitchcock in “Rope,” he’s leaning on the “long take,” which can be inherently suspenseful as the viewer is conditioned to expect edits, changes in points of view, etc., and the filmmaker isn’t providing any of those.
With split screen, like DePalma impersonating Hitchcock in “Dressed to Kill,” and many other examples of that camera trick (“More American Graffiti,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Grand Prix,” etc.), he’s forcing the viewer to decide on what to focus on.
We watch the barfly buy a bottle for the walk home as his favorite watering hole closes for the night. And we see the custodian, a student and single mom, running through phone numbers, trying to pinpoint why her older son hasn’t made it to the sitter’s yet.
Beth starts her nightly cleaning routine at the college, Scott drunk-dials (on a rotary phone) the wrong number, and their night — connected by phone — begins.
Scott talks in a slightly-slurred monotone, so much so that it’s a wonder Beth doesn’t dismiss him in a flash. They talk at cross purposes just long enough to establish that he doesn’t realize he’s not called the right number, and long enough for her to realize who he’s trying to reach. Not at first, though.
“Who’s answering the phones?
“No one, tonight.”
“What if people call?”
“It’s not my problem.”
Beth multi-tasks the way single moms do, distracted, trying not to be rude. And then Scott stumbles across the words that keep her from hanging up.
“It’s been a bad day…I had a son. He died.”
We know where this will go from that moment onward, with just a couple of possible twists crossing our minds as we do the math.
Does seeing all the action play out, on two halves of the screen and in real time, distract us enough to give the movie mystery and added suspense?
No. “Last Call” is enlivened considerably by Booth’s increasingly engaged and emotional performance. She will punch you in the heart before the film is finished.
This slight thriller doesn’t really suffer from its gimmicks. It’s just that director Booth learns what generations of filmmakers figured out before him, some of them masters of the medium. Every movie isn’t made this way because it’s anti-cinematic, as Hitch put it.
Editing, “montage,” is “the essence of cinema,” “The Master of Suspense” realized. Cutting, changing points of view, moving in tight on this actor or that prop, builds empathy and suspense. The speed of edits literally quickens the pulse (See a “Bourne” movie, any “Bourne” movie).
Take that away, force us to choose which character we’re going to focus on, and the gimmicks become pace-killing distractions.
The forlorn (and increasingly insistent) music by Adrian Ellis, a script that takes Beth from dismissive to too-obviously indulgent and “humoring,” and then to concerned, dialogue with flinty lines like “That’s the thing no one tells you about ‘rock bottom’ — it doesn’t exist” work with or without split screen.
They work a little less well when we can choose to ignore the drunk and focus on the increasingly frantic (still multi-tasking) Beth.
Booth has come too close to creating a filmed play — enlivened by long tracking shots of Beth scampering from room to room, phone to phone — to let this work as well as its thin, generic story would let it.
It was never going to be a dazzling addition to the genre. Is it enough to be remembered for the gimmick?
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Gavin Michael Booth, script by Gavin Michael Booth and Daved Wilkins
Cast: Daved Wilkins, Sarah Booth, Matt Maenpaa. A Mimetic Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:17
The cinematic equivalent of Monty Python’s “The Cheese Shop” sketch, “Dragon Kingdom” proves that the Jolly Oldies never get over their love of curdled, cured milk.
It’s a “Lord of the Rings Lite” lark, the sort of film a bunch of film professionals might fling together in their spare time, with borrowed historic settings, vinyl and leather remainders from a shoe factory and all the makeup they can cadge from work.
Digital effects? It has dragons, passably animated ones, with incompetent dragon’s shadows painting in on sunny days.
It’s go a stone ogre and goblins or “Orcs” as J.R.R. used to call them, a cloven-hoofed ram-man and lizard people and Amazons, called Qatori, here.
A veritable “Army of Abominations,” they’re named. Because they are.
And that’s nothing to the zombies, called “Furies,” that the foppish evil prince (Jon-Paul Gates) uses to stage his coup to try and seize the “Twelve Kingdoms of Azeroth!”
A smattering of punchy banter — not nearly enough — dresses up the dialogue.
“Any ideas?”
“Try not to DIE!”
Mostly though, what this no-budget action fantasy has, is good old British cheese — Cheshire to Wensleydale, Red Leicester to Teviotdale, and yes, I am using Wikipedia as my cheese thesaurus, because that’s allowed.
“Trampled by the dark army of Fury” begins the most exposition-heavy opening to a sword-and-sorcery epic since “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.”
It’s not really about dragons. I think an earlier title was “Dark Kingdom.” They just thought “Dragon” would sell this thing.
The coup begins, Princess Elizabeth (CoINcidence?), played by Rebecca Dyson-Smith, has a narrow escape, protected by two pre-Medieval knights (Ben Loyd-Holmes, Ross O’Hennessy) and a couple of fierce-looking lady warriors (Zara Phythian, Jemma Moore).
The Princess of Zaldar, and yeah, I’m just making up the spelling of what I heard, and her entourage make their getaway with a dragon’s egg. But like the dragons of the title, that’s a red herring.
The movie is REALLY about their attempts to reach the king via the Dark Kingdom.
But…but…”The Dark Kingdom is an evil place!” And…and…”No one has ever survived The Dark Kingdom!”
That’s where the haunted forest where the days are a trial and the knights are tested, the Qatori show their stuff and the princess can complain “But I want to learn to fight!”
Lame training sequence to follow.
I got a kick out of the period-appropriate historic village the film opens in, largely built from (plainly visible) mass production two by fours and the machine-milled lumber.
The assorted enemies in need of slaughtering have magical qualities, and really bad allergies. The zombies gurgle, perhaps a reaction to the burlap sack costumes they show up in.
“Can weapons not harm them?”
“Let’s cut off their heads and be done with it!”
“So THAT’s how we kill them!”
All this nonsense drifts into caves where there’s much hand-to-hand/ hand-to-claw combat.
And they top it all off by leaving things unresolved, in a Tolkien-esque sense.
Yes, there’ll always be an England and there’s always hope for a sequel.
Just don’t forget the cheese, and none of this “We’re fresh out” nonsense either.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Ross O’Hennessy, Jemma Moore, Ben Loyd-Holmes, Rebecca Dyson-Smith, Zara Phythian
Directed by Simon Wells, script by Aston Benoit, Ben Loyd-Holmes. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:25
Hot off the presses. A thriller that’s not exactly what the title gives away.
From the director of “Okja” and “Snowpiercer” and “The Host.”
“Parasite” won the Palm d’Or at Cannes and opens Oct. 11.
Movie Nation 