Movie Review: A Pop Music Fable trapped in YA Sci-Fi Land –“O’Dessa”

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

Generations raised on stories about this or that world/future/universe saved by “The Chosen One” deserve a musical about this post-religion/post Potter fantasy in the flesh.

So here’s “O’Dessa,” a close-to-the-present-day dystopian fable about a “Seventh Son” who happens to be a daughter whose “destiny” is to “ramble” and bring “the power her mighty guitar” to the masses so that they can shake off the ruinous TV-driven plutocracy that has them enslaved.

It stars one of the “Stranger Things” kids, Sadie Sink as a would-be Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger/Bob You-Know-Who. O’Dessa struggles and “resists” and sings her way to a moment when she can confront TV tyrant Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett from “The Last of Us” and “White Lotus”) on his live, propagandistic talent show telecast.

No matter what Gil Scott-Heron preached, in YA sci-fi fantasies, the revolution is ALWAYS televised.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays Yuri the love interest, a sultry singer following his Big Dream to Satylite City, and an almost-unrecognizable Regina Hall is the plutocrat-in-chief’s MC and muscle, and Yuri’s Sugar Mama.

It’s a musical, where “deep thoughts” are expressed in song — thirteen original tunes about romantic love and universal love and “I wish I was ramblin’ down that road,” sung by O’Dessa, or a about how her dad “rambled and picked up them cursed six strings” sung by her sickly, deserted Mom (Bree Elrod) or a Gospel sing-along about “That Glory Train” belted out by a thieving preacher (Mark Boone Jr.) who gets his hands on O’Dessa’s “Willow” guitar, the one passed down from her daddy, made from a lightning-struck willow tree.

The collection of banalities served up as tunes here fall on somewhere on the “pleasantly forgettable” end of the sliding “pleasanlt forgettable” to “adequate for a lesser musical” scale.

Not everybody here’s a natural singer, but Sink can sink her teeth into Jewel Kilcherish folk or summon up rockabilly hiccups when the need arises. And that there guitar is O’Dessa’s destiny, dadgum it.

The locations make emptied-out corners of Croatia resemble “Mad Max” Australia.

But the plot — conceived and written by “Patti Cake$” writer-director Geremy Jasper (who also co-wrote the songs) — is one big mashed-up mess that amounts to nothing new. It’s a little “Mad Max” and a lot more “Hunger Games,” all set in a lurid “Streets of Fire” musical dystopian milieu.

It’s ambitious, and you could see why Sink and Searchlight pictures might have been lured to the latest by the maverick who made “Patti Cake$.” But the blunt truth is that there’s very little that’s original or even interesting in this empty rehash of many a recent YA franchise with occasional pauses for song.

Turning “Divergent/Ready Player One” and “The Maze Runner” into “Rent” turns out to be a limp-tuned overreach.

Rating: PG-13, violence, sexual content, suggestions of drugs, profanity

Cast: Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Mark Boone Jr. and Regina Hall

Credits: Scripted and directed by Geremy Jasper, songs by Jason Binnick and Geremy Jasper. A Searchlight release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:46

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Movie Review: Numbing even without the violence –“Novocaine”

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

It begins with sentiment, introducing a character worthy of our sympathy, if not our pity.

There’s an emotional tug to the scenes in which the guy with the genetic malady connects with that cute co-worker who seems to “get” him.

Sure, “the old ultra-violence” is coming, over-the-top and played for laughs. But there’s something to be said for having the grace to humanize your characters before you cartoonize them.

“Novocaine” is a gonzo action farce about an ordinary loner, an office drone born with an inability to feel pain. When first tested, he’s anything but brave. But take away a person who means something to him, and he gets there. A quick learner, we see him doing the calculus involved with confronting murderous goons.

How much damage would I do myself if I clock this guy with a searing-hot frying pan that will cook my hand? Can I kill this other guy with the tip of the crossbow bolt sticking out of my leg? How much pain can a tattoo artist tolerate from the tool of his trade?

Co-directed by the “Villains” and “Significant Other” team of Dan Berk and Robert Olson and scripted by Lars Jacobson, “Novocaine” tests the viewer’s tolerance for pain in an action comedy that mimics “Kick-Ass.” But confined to events of a single, frantic day, the filmmakers would have been better served checking out the manic mayhem of “Crank.”

“Novocaine” is a classic 88 minute film wrapped in a 110 minute package. Once the action kicks in with a bank robbery, it just lurches to a halt in between the half a dozen set-piece fights they cook up for our misfit millennial.

Nate, an assistant manager at a credit union, rises to the occasion. Jack Quaid, as that guy nicknamed Novocaine by the jerks in his middle school, likewise delivers the goods.

But the movie never gets up to speed, never manages much more than a stagger when it should pass by at a “don’t-overthink-this” sprint.

Nate, a gawky video gamer so conditioned to avoid injury that he won’t eat solid food — “I might bite my tongue off” and not feel it — is transformed into “a superhero” in the presence of Sherry, played by Amber Midthunder of “Prey.” She’s new to the San Diego credit union where they work.

Sure, he’s assistant manager and thus her boss and should, by rights and policy, steer clear. But she’s curious to the point of “interested.” When he’s with her, he’ll even try solid food –cherry pie, of course.

But that’s the day before three armed Santas barge into the bank, shooting and torturing and murdering the manager, clobbering Nate and taking Sherry hostage.

When he wakes up and realizes they’ve outgunned the first cops on the scene, good guy Nate gives first aid to a downed officer, steals his cruiser and sidearm, and sets out to save the first woman who’s ever paid the least bit of attention to him.

Three robbers? That’s three fights in his future, to say nothing of the hulking tattoo artist (Garth Collins) who might help him find his way to the “gang” that emptied the vault he was so reluctant to open for them.

Giving our hero a sad, underexplained past and lonely present pays off.

“When you don’t have anybody to care about, it’s harder to get hurt,” is the message here.

But the filmmakers did more research on Nate’s real-world condition — CIPA, Congenital Insensitivity to Pain — than most anything else in the “real” world of the movie.

Employee protocols during a bank robbery to no-dating-your-underlings edicts to police procedure — Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh play the detectives who wryly sleepwalk through this “ticking clock” scenario — to the way the justice system really works are bent to suit the lazy contrivances of the screenwriter of “Day of the Dead: Bloodline.”

Jacob Batalon, Spider-Man’s latest sidekick, is introduced as a gamer/”friend” who helps the hero, and the movie’s shortcomings are underlined in this character and this performance. He’s been funnier in literally every other action comedy/comic book film he’s been in.

Midthunder struggles with the script’s efforts to complicate her character. Ray Nicholson, as the leader of the robber gang, is over the top in the most conventional ways.

Quaid, the son Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is at his best in the scenes that humanize Nate — a compassionate loan officer who cuts a customer some slack, a first aid addict who cares for others before he gets around to the self-surgery he needs to complete to keep from bleeding out between the brawls he almost always loses right up to the moment he doesn’t.

But the movie around him shuffles and lurches along, a narrative that unfolds in fits and starts. Thrillers live on tension and rising suspense. This one discards suspense too early. And action comedies are, by design, fast and furious. This one, while serving up some serioulsy gory action and splatter film laughs, can’t get out of its own way.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, and profanity. Lots of profanity.

Cast: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh and Jacob Batalon

Credits: Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, scripted by Lars Jacobson. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:50

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Movie Review: A Treasure Trove of Secrets are concealed via a “Black Bag”

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

You don’t see men in turtlenecks anymore. They mostly turn up in spy thrillers, these days — gloomy, conspiratorial pictures with a fall, wintry or too-early spring setting, scripted to match the Cold War that passed and the chilly one that’s taken its place.

Steven Soderbergh knows this. That’s why the director and his team put star Michael Fassbender in a whole collection of neck-hiding sweater-shirts for “Black Bag,” a crackling good mystery thriller about spies spying on spies, the hunt for a traitor and the looming menace of Russia, still trapped, blundering and bleeding in a war it started with an untrustworthy American president/ex-president/president’s blessings.

Veteran screenwriter David Koepp has written some of the biggest blockbusters of the last quarter century. But here he and Soderbergh go smaller, more intimate in turning to a tale of married spies, one of whom suspects the worst of the other.

But “Black Bag” isn’t “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” without the laughs. Casting an ex-James Bond and ex-Miss Moneypenny is about the only “joke” in it. With or without laughs, it’s witty, a crisp, chilly spy thriller with striking settings, top drawer actors and the finest wardrobe this side of “Wicked.”

The writer, director and cast hunt for treason and crueler, more personal betrayals among people “who lie for a living” in an open homage to the master of the genre, British spy author John le Carré. Koepp even names his protagonist, master interrogator and mistrusting spouse “George,” after le Carre’s greatest creation — the dull but cunning and relentless George Smiley.

This George is an obviously well-paid, well-housed and immaculately turned-out top dog in Britain’s spy agency, a man married to a senior spook (Cate Blanchett) given a tip that there’s a mole in their ranks.

There’s this malware, cleverly named for the hound that guards hell, that may have gotten out. Five people are suspected, one of them happens to be Kathryn, George’s wife.

“Some things really are best swept under a rug,” he sighs.

Still, this shouldn’t be much of a test for the most feared polygraph interrogator in the West. But George has “something more elegant” in mind. He’ll invite these colleagues to dinner, not tip his wife about what’s up, and “play a game” designed to reveal a cadre of professional liars’ darkest secrets — infidelity, ethical lapses, unprofessional behavior and perhaps treason.

That utterly delicious plot device pays dividends aplenty as it sets up this week-long, somewhat leisurely race against the clock to prevent a spy-made disaster while navigating treachery and just enough plot twists to keep us guessing.

“This ends with someone in the boot of a car,” Blanchett’s Kathryn cackles at one point. We only have to wonder who it might be, and what model Jaguar they’ll be stuffed in.

Fassbender is downright inscrutable as George — asking questions and never ever answering queries from others. But Blanchett’s Kathryn is a trickier turn. She has to conveying cynicism and innocence, planting and nurturing the seeds of doubt as she does.

Ex-Bond franchise player Naomie Harris ably plays the in-house shrink at this version of MI-whatever, a person of duty and feelings resigned to a job where she has to know most of those agents forced to meet with her will lie and lie and lie to keep their jobs and the illusion that this work doesn’t make one insane.

Sleeping with one of her agent/clients (Regé-Jean Page) might be the least of her sins.

Marisa Abela plays Clarissa, a very smart young spy-sat manager who may be compromised, as she is dating veteran spy Freddy (Tom Burke, never better) as a means of working out self-confessed “daddy issues.”

And ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan plays the old Cold Warrior spy chief, a superior not invited to that opening dinner party/interrogation who might be more in or out of the loop than everyone assumes, flailing about, ineffectually barking orders between suit changes and sushi outings.

Koepp and Soderbergh make this as much about mistrust and fidelity in a marriage as it is about spies-gone-wrong. They keep their film intimate and interrogatory, giving it an old fashioned theatrical feel.

And they insist on bringing glamour back to the spy game. Forget the coarser Bonds and jumpsuited “Mission: Impossibles.” This world has swank townhouses, gourmet food and dresses and suits to match that affluence. British civil servants make out pretty good, I must say.

And this cast, to a one, has never looked better on screen. I almost never notice clothes in a movie, but I stayed through the credits to see if Brosnan or Page’s tailors got a “Thank You.” Alas, I’ll have to settle for a turtleneck. Surely they’ll be in stock next winter, thanks to this showcase of espionage cool.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, sexual references

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page and Pierce Brosnan.

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, scripted by David Koepp. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:33

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Something appears “off”about this showing of “Novocaine”

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

It’s slow enough without a ten minute delay due to projector download issues.

Two credited directors? Which one was responsible for the pacing? The bits between the torture, no-pain but blood and burns and broken bones and bullet wound fights dragged and dragged and dragged.

Full review later. “Black Bag” time.

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Filmgoing in S. Fla is about to Get More Fascist

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

“And the Oscar (for Best Documentary Feature) goes to, ‘No Other Land,'” a Palestinian/Israeli project with Palestinian and Norwegian producers.

It’s another documentary doing what American media in particular have avoided, reporting on Israel’s brutal land-grabbing practices by focusing on four years of seizures, schemes and military operations targeting Masafer Yatta.

Now, the Jewish mayor of Miami Beach, after arm-twisting a local indie cinema into not showing the Oscar winning film, has threatened to pull grant money and in effect “evict” O Cinema from its space on city owned property for showing this important film anyway.

A lot of people have burned through a lot of outrage over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, killing and kidnapping civilians including foreign tourists. But one can see that as a heinous act and still recognize what’s been obvious for decades and decades — that Israel is ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population of Palestine, a perverse variation of Adolf Hitler’s “Lebensraum” in all but name.

Whatever the Western news media cover from Israel’s point of view, or fear covering altogether, the facts have been laid out by plenty of others, especially in documentary films. I’ve reviewed scores of documentaries touching on this subject, with even the “Plant a Tree in Mother Israel” charity implicated in this nefarious “erasure” of Palestine and Palestinians.

Social media is overrun with declarations that being anti-Israeli/anti Netanyahu/anti-Right Wing Apartheid/land-grabbing policies does not make one anti-Semitic. That knee-jerk accusation has been trotted out so often regarding Rape of Gaza criticism as to lose its meaning.

Israel is the least popular it’s ever been in this country because of the Gaza genocide and Netanyahu’s manipulation of it to cover his government’s incompetence and interfere with American elections as he dragged out a murderous “invasion” never meant to recover hostages.

So, not a good look for Mayor Steve Meiner. He comes off like an Israeli apologist of the worst sort. He’s anti free speech in that Israel can’t be criticized for policies the world and the World Court have condemned and he’s attacking an Oscar winning movie he hasn’t seen, one made by Palestinians and Israelis and endorsed and honored by disproportionately Jewish Hollywood.

What a putz.

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Movie Preview: A Nasty Norwegian Goof on The Brothers Grimm — “The Ugly Stepsister”

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

IFC/Shudder has this one, whose trailer is worth a grim grin or two, slated for April 18 release.

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Movie Review: Prospective Parents Olsen and Patel quake at “The Assessment” by Alicia Vikander

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Assessment” is smart and sinister sci-fi of “The Handmaids Tale” school, a striking, minimalist parable about humanity’s failings in facing an inhumane future.

A geographically and architecturally stark setting hosts a grim lecture on family, population and the psychology of loss, with all involved presided over by a ruthlessly pragmatic and fascist “State.” And a fine cast humanizes the toll that takes on the psyche, and the true costs of a disaster twisted into a lonely, self-actualizing utopia.

Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel play Mia and Aaryan, a couple of high-value scientists living in a roomy, efficient, AI-equipped mansion on a remote rocky beach. She’s a plant biologist, studying and tinkering with everything from algae on up the evolutionary ladder, looking for future food sources. He’s a virtual reality engineer, perfecting the simulated behavior and tactile texture of a VR cat and a chimp.

You don’t want to know what happened to “real” pets in this future, under the “dome” that separates the “New World” from the Old.

This is post-climate change civilization, when a disaster has empowered a State to compensate for human pettiness, greed, pollution and waste. Simply adding a new baby to the populace requires state permission and state involvement. An “assessment” is required, and even if a couple passes, there’ll be no bringing a baby into this Brave New World the old fashioned way.

Sex is strictly for pleasure.

Alicia Vikander is the stern, primly-dressed state appointed assessor, Virginia. It’s going to take a lot more than their assurance that “We would be really great parents” to sell her.

Virginia is to stay with them for seven days, questioning and “testing” their fitness for this grave responsibility, and it is implied, strain on the “resources” of the state.

It begins with intrusive questioning.

“Why do you want a child?” makes sense. “How often do you have sex?” seems immaterial. And questioning smart people — scientists — makes it go more slowly. Because Mia in particular has questions about Virginia’s questions. Almost anything out of Virginia’s mouth is worth an “Is this part of the ‘test?'”

Virginia insists on a different bedroom — theirs. And when they have sex on the single bed they take in her stead, she sneaks up to watch.

“Just act as if I’m not here.”

As they explain their work and their daily routines, as they assemble a state-approved geodesic dome nursery/playhouse, Virginia watches, taking notes and judging with every glance.

It’s when she starts acting the part of an unruly, rebellious, won’t-eat/won’t-cooperate child, that this “Assessment” turns truly hairy.

The rational viewer can accept some of what’s going on as “EVERY parent should be able and qualified to handle this.” We’re all social workers when it comes to how other people raise (or don’t) their children. But the Darwinian extremes here are fascism laid bare.

The script, by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas (see below) and John Donnelly, ratchets up the pressure on the couple as it exposes traumas in their pasts and shortcomings in their personalities. Tests like a surprise dinner party with other parents and a child, relatives and that one rude child-intolerant adult (Minnie Driver, deliciously despicable) forced to contend with Virginia behaving monstrously reveal much.

The Oscar-winning Vikander lets us see the calculation in Virginia, and hints at her own “issues” and shortcomings. Is this “Assessment” really by the book?

Patel (“Yesterday,””Tenet”) lays bare the rift that being “the favorite” parent sets up, and the human failings Aaryan sees in his wife but not in himself.

Olsen makes Mia earthy but flinty, motherly with an edge, lawyer-sharp in her logic, sexy with an agenda.

Director Fleur Fortune, a music video veteran, insists on setting up a sleek, austere “classic” sci-fi future of under-populated affluence with big open spaces outside and inside the McMansion by sea — Mondrian stained glass window, the works. But the emptiness conveys loneliness and doesn’t hide the ugly realities of how such star-kissed lives are achieved in civilization’s idealized next stage.

She’d have been well-served to give the third act a vigorous cut, as the story reaches a conclusion and wanders into an epilogue that suggests (sci-fi) logical extremes beyond that outcome, which is anticlimactic by design.

But “The Assessment” is still a most impressive debut feature. It manages to chill and even amuse as we ponder the consequences of our impractical, self-destructive, selfish and politically shortsighted present in a future that might look utopian, with the horrific dystopian reality merely papered over by choice real estate.

Rating: R, sexual content, nudity, violence, profanity

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen, Himesh Patel, Leah Harvey, Nicholas Pinnock, Charlotte Ritchie and Minnie Driver.

Credits: Directed by Fleur Fortune, scripted by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas (Nell Garfath Cox, Dave Thomas) and John Donnelly. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:53

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Movie Preview: Gambling, Same Sex Attraction “On Swift Horses”

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter and Daisy Edgar-Jones head the cast of this adaptation of the Shannon Pufahl novel.

Edgar-Jones and Poulter play a married couple upended by the risky business his brother brings to their lives and relationships.

April 25, this Korean War saga of “the love that dare not speak its name” comes to theaters.

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Series Preview: Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn and grand theft of the rich and entitled — “Your Friends Neighbor’s”

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

Hamm’s a high roller who hits the wall and resorts to stealing from his well heeled “Friends & Neighbors.”

Possibilities?

April 11, this series hits Apple TV+.

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Movie Preview: “Lilies Not For Me,” a dark, period piece same sex romance

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

The bad old days for being gay included institutionalization, treatments and the search for a “cure.”

This period piece comes from the producers of “Call Me By Your Name,” with Finn O’Shea and Robert Aramayo as the young lovers, and Erin Kellyman as the nurse “date” who takes it all down.

All part of the treatment, you see, in writer-director Will Seefried’s retelling.

“Lilies Not for Me” streams April 4.

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