Movie Nation

If you follow his various social media feeds (@rustyrockets) and ventures, Russell Brand seems a lot more interested in spiritual and post political things than in comedy of movies.

But Kenneth Branagh wants him to join Gal Gadot and Armor Jammer, among others, for his latest Poirot picture, “Death on the Nile.”

Sounds…nuts. Will he accept? It’s about as mainstream a project as Brand has ever dipped into, hints that he’s at home with the 50-and-over audience, etc.

From the Hollywood Reporter…

https://t.co/eFAt4KTliW https://twitter.com/THR/status/1162307023054278657?s=17

Take away the shark cage, and you can title your sequel “47 Meters Down: Uncaged.”

The fact that your heroines in peril are no longer “47 meters down” isn’t a deal breaker. They’re not in the open ocean, stuck in a cage with oxygen running out and a shark or sharks keeping them trapped. But cave diving is actually a much more dangerous activity within the scuba community. Theoretically, that adds a little claustrophobia to the other phobias that the original “47 Meters Down,” one of the great sleepers of recent years, managed.

And heck, let’s stick a blind shark or two in the dark grottoes of this Yucatan Peninsula, just for kicks.

But there’s no getting around the fact that subbing in passable older supporting players (Nia Long and John Corbett in place of Matthew Modine) and parking a bunch of barely legal bikini bottoms and expecting any of them to measure up to Mandy Moore as an actress was the big gamble, here. And it doesn’t pay off.

“Uncaged” is inherently less intense, less nerve-wracking and less fulfilling than the film it follows. It’s clutter where the first film was simplicity, with shoulder-shrugging deaths where the first film made you feel its high stakes desperation.

The film can’t swim out of its own way, most of the time.

Sophie Nélisse and Corinne Foxx are step sisters who have moved with their parents (Long and Corbett) to the Yucatan Peninsula where Dad is leading the scuba exploration of Mayan caves lost to rising sea levels.

Mia (Nélisse) is bullied at the Modine Prep School for Girls (Yup, that’s right.), Sahsha (Foxx) rolls her eyes rather than help. But when they’re supposed to bond over a group glass-bottom boat-ride in shark waters and Sasha has the chance to go do something more fun with her friends, she brings Mia along.

Before you can say “Bring your bikini!” they’re all diving in a coastal grotto that leads into the same cave system Dad is working in. Teenagers being teenagers, mistakes are made and soon they’re trapped in the dark with their oxygen running out, cut off from escape by a cave-blind Great White Shark.

Yeah.

The foreshadowing is too too obvious, the assorted set pieces have no punch and little logic.

The claustrophobia is never emphasized, only one death is wrenching and one other death has something like surprise in it.

But we know where this is going even as it takes its sweet time getting there. Brianne Tju is the standout in the cast, the ONLY actor (including Corbett) who gets across the panic such a situation warrants. Sly Stallone’s kid Sistine Rose Stallone barely registers, something Jamie Foxx’s daughter Corrine manages.

As I said, “bikini bottoms,” something the script (“Sasha, you can barely get your ass through this!” “Shut up, Nicole! As least I HAVE an ass!”) and the sometimes leering direction emphasize.

The sharks don’t exist in real space. They look digitally animated into a process-shot underwater cave.

Mark this one “Uncaged” and going down for the third time.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense peril, bloody images, and brief strong language

Cast: Sophie Nélisse, Brianne Tju, Corinne Foxx, Sistine Rose Stallone John Corbett and Nia Long

Credits: Directed by Johannes Roberts, script by Ernest Riera, Johannes Roberts An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1

Entertainment Studios doesn’t typically preview their films far and wide for critics, so let’s see if this works without Mandy Moore or Matthew Modine.

“Chained for Life” is a fascinating if daft parable about normative beauty as it appears on the big screen.

The director of the festival fave “Go Down Death” has made a movie within a movie within a movie, all of them clever inversions of Todd Browning’s 1932 cult classic about circus sideshow folk, “Freaks.” It takes its title from a 1952 film starring actual Siamese twins, and its marching orders from an opening quote by the late film critic Pauline Kael, about how the movies are filled with unnaturally beautiful people.

“And why not? We love to look at them.”

A German “auteur” is making his first movie in America. Herr Director (“Dick Tracy/What About Bob/Hook” child star Charlie Korsmo) has an amusingly inconsistent Werner Herzog accent, and a vision.

“Marked for Life” he calls his film, and he’s cast a pretty starlet, Mabel (Jess Weixler from “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” and TV’s “The Son”) to play a blind woman seeking treatment at a strange hospital/sanitarium in the late 1950s.

The hospital has giants and dwarves, a bearded lady, Siamese twins and all manner of unusual looking folks, “freaks” as they were called in the less-enlightened past, “Undesirables” as Herr Director will eventually re-title his movie. And he won’t hear of using makeup or digital effects to make them this way.

“Nein! Ze suffering must be REAL!”

Thus, the co-star for this “mad visionary” director’s leading lady must be played by Rosenthal. He is played by British actor and TV presenter Adam Pearson, whose neurofibromatosis made him the daring choice to host programs such as “The Undateables” and “Beauty and the Beast,” and who appeared alongside Scarlett Johansson in “Under the Skin.”

Mabel may be “slumming” on an indie film with a “hot” director, hoping to get a career bounce. But this film, with its blind woman/Elephant Man romance, “exploitative” to some, is going to be challenging on a very human level. And by God, whatever pause Rosenthal’s facial tumors, the huge folds of skin that all but hide his eyes, may give her, she’s going to prove she’s up to it.

She is solicitous, encouraging, open, offering to help the non-actor cast opposite her learn to act for the movies. In a series of close-ups, we see him ask her how to show “fear,” “happiness” and “empathy.”

She’s reassuring even as he says “children and dogs are terrified of me,” and that this IS his “happy” face.

“That director, he’s intimidating!”

“Not really.  It’s his accent. It makes him sound like a villain.”

As they bond, we’re treated to an Altmanesque view of movie-making, the organized chaos of a film set, overheard dizzy conversations where the pretentious actor (Stephen Plunkett) playing the German-accented surgeon at the hospital recites Shakespeare and a producer confuses it “for that movie about the rich little orphan girl.”

They’re shooting in a real re-opened old Carnegie-financed hospital, where real staff and patients keep their distance in other wings. If the crew runs roughshod over parking or off-limits areas and a staff member tries to find who on the shoot to complain to, or if a cop shows up about this “man with marks on his face” case we see talked about on TV, the crew, to a one, say “You need to see Trentolini.”

Trentolini does not exist. It’s just a way of blowing you off, unworthy non-film person.

We see scenes play out, busted takes and retakes. Herr Director, in one of the film’s many delicious (or eye-rolling) drawn-out scenes, explains the concept of “making your ENTRANCE” to non-actor Rosenthal. He does this, with Rosenthal on camera, in closeup, about to enter a shot in a pool of light, explaining to him off camera by reciting the entire opening of “The Muppet Movie” until the moment Orson Welles shows up for his “entrance.”

And as we watch dailies, the footage that’s already in the can, we watch Mabel watch Rosenthal and see the wheels turning about how she sees this warm, British and self-aware “deformed” man and wonder about what she values and her own prejudices.

The film’s roving camera on a busy set is reminiscent of many movies-about-making-a-movie, especially Michael Winterbottom’s “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.” There’s overlapping dialogue, competing agendas, little snippets of actors’ vanity (beauty treatments at the end of the day), a director losing his concentration to his star questioning the “reality” of a blind woman “touching” someone’s eyes, physically, and deciding he is “beautiful.”

“Vy are you bringing zis to me, now?” His scene was written as “a poetic truth, a rhapsodic truth,” so don’t question it.

I got a kick out of seeing Korsmo, who hasn’t acted on camera in 20 years (he’s a law professor at Case Western Reserve University), ham his way through this obvious poseur, an artiste who claims he grew up in a circus, but probably isn’t even German.

Weixler lets us see what an expressive actress she can be, just with her face. Shadows fall across her appearance as she ponders Rosenthal and questions her snap judgement of this unattractive non-actor she’s agreed to co-star with.

Max (Plunkett), the shallow pretty boy in the cast? He has no such self-reflection about Rosenthal.

“You’d make a great Richard III!

Several members of the cast joke about “membership” in this production, quoting that infamous line from “Freaks” — “One of us!” But that’s emblematic of how they treat these “undesirables.” Cast and crew stay in a nearby hotel, the “freaks” stay on set, in the hotel, and guard the equipment.

Which leads to them making their own movie, after hours, one that further flips the script on “normal” and “beautiful.”

It’s a lot to chew on, and I’m not sure it makes absolute sense.

“Chained for Life” invites repeat viewing and “cult film” status, pretty much by design. Whatever writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s other intentions, he’s made a must-see movie for film buffs, one you must-see again just to get all the inside jokes.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Jess Weixler, Adam Pearson, Stephen Plunkett, Charlie Korsmo

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:31

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