I had some doubts, interviewing him some years ago. But the demented garbage pouring out of his sewer hole these days has the tint of backwoods dolt about it.
The real “acting” must have been as a compassionate teacher of black kids in “Conrack,” and a war protesting paraplegic veteran in “Coming Home.” Considering the man’s Supervillain politics these days, I mean.
For truth in advertising, it’s hard to beat the title “Friedkin Uncut.”
This documentary about the great, not-forgotten but certainly under-heralded director of “The Exorcist,” “The French Connection,” “The Boys in the Band,” “Sorcerer,” “Bug” and “Killer Joe” is formless and right on the cusp of artless.
Its opening shot is of William Friedkin, who will turn 84 August 29, rolling up to his art-filled L.A. mansion in his Lexus.
For Pete’s sake.
He starts off rattling on about Hitler and Jesus, backpedaling to ensure nobody thinks he admires them both equally. “Good and evil,” he’s making a point about. Sort of.
And therein lies the triumph of the film. It is William Friedkin himself, a lovely old man of the cinema, a raconteur with a sort of Trumpian flare for hyperbole, rambling and not false, but somewhat inauthentic modesty. He’s a hoot.
So it doesn’t matter that this documentary appreciation spends silly amounts of time following Friedkin to French, Italian and Spanish film festivals, where he’s feted. It doesn’t matter that the documentary’s director is a little-credited actor (a “footman” in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) turned first-time movie maker and comes off, at times, as wincingly out of his depth.
The film’s “star” and his work, his actors, his peers, his filmdom fans are all that matter. And they’re packed into this 107 minute biography and fan letter.
“Exorcist” star Ellen Burstyn breaks down why the film works, that “It starts on a very real level” and “step by step” moves to the horrific, which is why it scares the dickens out of people. Then she remembers how the great Max Von Sydow, whom Friedkin calls “the greatest actor in the world…at the time” kept blowing his line, “The power of Christ compels you!”
Maybe his atheism had something to do with that, they allow.
Friedkin relates the story of hiring Stacy Keach, and then letting himself get talked into replacing him with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and sometime actor Jason Miller.
And we’re off, with Francis Ford Coppola praising his directing contemporary telling stories “in the most direct possible way…He doesn’t philosophize about evil. He shows it.”
From action auteur Walter Hill (“48 Hours,” “Southern Comfort”) to horror master Dario Argento, Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino to Edgar Wright (“Hot Fuzz”), and Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”), who went to high school in North Chicago with Friedkin, all are here to marvel over the movies and pay their respects.
The actors? Juno Temple and Matthew McConaughey (“Killer Joe”), Gina Gershon and Michael Shannon (“Bug”), Willem Dafoe and William Peterson (“To Live and Die in L.A.”) all talk about Friedkin’s “method,” treating actors like their characters, challenging them.
The fact that we don’t hear from Gene Hackman (“The French Connection” movies), Al Pacino (“Cruising”) or anybody from the many bombs that put his career in the shadows in the ’80s into the ’90s (“Deal of the Century,” “The Guardian,” “Blue Chips”) sticks out.
Maybe they were underwhelmed by the documentarian’s credits, too.
Technique? Friedkin likes to get what he wants in a single take. He’s always gone for “spontaneity” over “perfection,” he admits, pointing to “bad” shots that made it into his movies.
They shot the most famous chase in screen history, in “The French Connection,” on the fly in New York on a Sunday morning.
What’s that “spontaneity” do to actors?
“There’s no holding back, no charming your way through the scene,” Michael Shannon says.
“Rehearsal is for sissies. Rehearsal… is for dummies,” Friedkin declares.
“You just let it rip, from take one,” Matthew McConaughey offers.
Tarantino talks about how no filmmaker since can make the claim that the movie they’re making is too difficult, “challenging,” or “dangerous.” Not if it’s not as difficult as Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” as Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” or as Friedkin’s jungle masterpiece, “Sorcerer.”
The best line from somebody not Friedkin in “Friedkin Uncut” comes from Coppola.
“Both ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ were made at a time when if you wanted to show something extraordinary you had to DO something extraordinary. And film it.”
Suck on that, Christopher Nolan.
And after Tarantino has talked up how one learns to stage and shoot a chase scene, on foot or in a car, by watching Friedkin, the master gets off a zinger.
“When it comes to chases, nobody can top Buster Keaton.”
The odd hilarious, profane declaration, leading a film festival audience as he sings “Singin’ in the Rain,” and too many shots of Friedkin getting coffee, “directing” his director and what not, the formlessness becomes a big part of the charm here.
A director who speaks of his “craft” and “professionalism” and pooh poohs “art,” a damned fine documentarian in his own right (Check out this interview/film he did with the great German master Fritz Lang on Youtube), you know William “Billy” Friedkin wouldn’t have it any other way.
MPAA Rating: unrated, screen violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: William Friedkin, Ellen Burstyn, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Juno Temple, Dario Argento, Willem Dafoe, Gina Gershon, Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Hill, and Matthew McConaughey
Written and directed by Francesco Zippel. An AMB Distribution/QUOAIT release.
Running time: 1:47
The brisk, violent opening act of “The Kitchen” sets us up for a two-hour wallow in the grit, grime and crime of 1970s New York.
The novelty alone, the building of a crime empire run by three women “married to the mob,” is a great hook. Casting the newly-serious Melissa McCarthy, trying to be serious Tiffany Haddish and on a career-roll Elisabeth Moss as the leads is another.
But as the picture sputters and stalls, losing its quick pace and brutal efficiency in the later acts, this comic book adaptation reveals the flaws in its execution, if not its very origins.
McCarthy, Haddish and Moss are married into the Hells Kitchen Irish mob which, by the late ’70s, wasn’t just on its last legs, it was on crutches. And the marriages? Well, they’re various degrees of “limping along,” too.
Ruby (Haddish) is married to gang leader Kevin (James Badge Dale), a bossy Neanderthal who calls the shots at home and on the street. His mob ties go back generations. His “Animal Kingdom” mother (Margot Martindale) lives with them.
Kathy (McCarthy) is a mother of two who learned long ago not to question Jimmy’s (Brian Darcy James) sudden departures, explained with nothing more than “I got a thing to take care of.”
And Claire (Moss) has it worst of all, childless and pummeled on a regular basis by her brute (Jeremy Bobb) of a husband.
The best mob pictures, films like “Donnie Brasco,” are the ones that give us the dirty little secret these violent “Godfather” fans don’t want to get out. They’re lazy, lying, lowlife cheats who don’t pay their bills, can’t form a coherent thought and are bullying idiots to boot. Their special gift is chutzpah, having the brass to demand respect, to make good on a few of their violent threats as they collect “protection money” and expect unquestioning loyalty even if it’s not how they treat others.
Maybe there’s a reason “The Kitchen” is coming out in this particular presidency.
Kevin, Jimmy and Rob are bottom-feeding numbskulls. It isn’t enough that they’re caught red-handed by the Feds as they knock over a liquor store. They’ve got to beat up F.B.I. agents (Common) until NYPD shows up and it’s game over.
Prison for them, but what for their unemployed wives? “You’ll be taken care of” new boss (Myk Watford) promises, then bellows again when they see how little they’re told to get by with. Ruby’s mob matriarch mother-in-law practically spits on them. And merely being free from beatings isn’t enough to keep Claire going.
But if the guys tossed in prison were dumbbells, what’s that say for the gang “Little Jackie” (Watford) is left to run? They can’t collect because they can’t be bothered to protect. And respect? Fuggedaboutit.
A desperate Kathy offers to “help” with the collecting. They’ll use reason, persuasion and improved customer service to win back the delis, shoe stores and other businesses in their corner of Lower Manhattan. They’ll put a couple of under-employed tough guys on the payroll. They’ll split the take with Little Jackie.
Showing the guys up isn’t going to make them many friends. But just when things turn uglier, the sociopathic ginger hit man Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson) comes back to town, “protecting” Claire, who is tired of needing that.
Watching this abused woman “snap” is one of the guilty pleasures of “The Kitchen.” One abuser is taken care of, but Claire doesn’t want Gabriel to do that for her. She wants to learn from him. The sociopath, who is sweet on her, teaches Claire Hitman 101.
“You gotta slice open the abdomen and punch holes in both’a the lungs,” he demonstrates with a corpse in her tub. Claire learns how to get bodies to sink, where to dump them and at what times the river will take them out to sea.
Sick. But kind of funny.
Bill Camp shows up as a bigger, more menacing Italian mob boss who appreciates their efficiency and the idea of “looking out for your family.” There is nobody better at playing this sort of “I’m a reasonable man” but still murderous villain in the movies today.
But as the bodies pile up and their little empire grows, conflicts between the women kick in and “The Kitchen” becomes more meat-and-potatoes dull by the minute.
Metallic comic book dialogue, flat performances, thinly-developed empathy and underdeveloped morality pull the picture’s punches.
Only Moss stands out in the starring trio. Claire was at her breaking point, and falling in love with a hitman doesn’t fend off that psychotic break. Haddish, new to this sort of thing, basically plays one note throughout. As it’s not a funny note, Ruby starts to grate. She starts out mad, mouthy and ruthless and stays mad, mouthy and ruthless.
And McCarthy’s character is meant to be the one with the most dramatic arc, from a housewife and mother simply trying to feed her kids with the one job open to them in America’s “National Malaise,” to a woman every bit as hard as her pre-hardened compatriots. The script and her performance of it don’t carry enough pathos in Kathy to make this come off.
A two-scene cameo lets Annabella Sciorra, as the wife of Camp’s Italian mob boss, play more pathos, spine and heart than anything McCarthy or Haddish summon. She not only shows the stars up, but she hints at the movie this might have been.
The picture has an empowered subtext, and that is kept front and center even as the body count piles up. Having a woman writer-director (Andrea Berloff) certainly helped the film stay on message in that regard.
But Berloff, the screenwriter of “World Trade Center” and “Straight Outta Compton,” isn’t working so much outside her milieu as beyond her time frame. Putting pimps and hookers on the neon-lit streets is not all it takes to make a ’70s thriller.
The murders stop shocking at some point. Aside from a seedy bar or backroom scene or two, where’s the grit?
There were many moments when I wondered why a line wasn’t playing, even as I was noticing how pricey and perfect everybody’s hair, makeup and wardrobe were. Yes, they look like a million bucks. So make’em give you another take, one with some heat in it.
As the director of “Ocean’s 8” could tell you, obsessing on the characters’ appearance at the expense of drama and realism may make for a more distinctly feminine take on this well-worn genre. But it’s no substitute for tension, danger, for dramatic and sexual heat.
Berloff would have been better-served had she made Kathy’s “teachable moment” remark to her little girl her own guiding ethos.
“Pretty don’t matter. It’s just a tool women can use.”
MPAA Rating:R for violence, language throughout and some sexual content
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Camp
Credits: Written and directed by Andrea Berloff, based on the comic book series. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:42
It helps to remember that Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter who conjured up the original “Jacob’s Ladder” back in 1990, also wrote the blockbuster “Ghost.”
And Mr. Rubin, as he told me way back then, wrote these afterlife thrillers during his deep dive into “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” holding his interest, too.
Sure, we all remember the “vibrating man” effects — apparitions shaking into a blur, an effect used often in the decades since. But these were thought-provoking ghost stories in an era that produced those, tales of time and memory unhinged and an afterlife that offers either peace and closure or eternal damnation.
And yes, purgatory might mean you’re stuck on New York’s subway system for all eternity.
The new “Jacob’s Ladder” is significantly different from the original in many ways, but not in a couple of important ones.
Casting Michael Ealy, a leading man given to playing sensitive leads or haunted heavies, pays off. He is Jacob, an Iraq War vet confused by the unraveling reality of life back home in Atlanta, and Ealy’s an old pro at convincing us of shock, terror and hurt. His eyes scream “The horror, the horror” when the need arises.
And the tone of this David M. Rosenthal remake — he did Ealy’s “The Perfect Man” with Sanaa Lathan and Morris Chestnut — is spooky and spot on.
It works about as well as a remake that’s half an hour shorter than the original can work, which isn’t a ringing endorsement, I know. Still worth taking a look at.
Jacob Singer is an Atlanta trauma surgeon who works in the city Veterans Administration hospital. He was a combat trauma surgeon in Iraq, and that experience hangs over him, with memory overwhelming his present reality on occasion.
Jacob didn’t realize the patient he was about to lose in a field hospital in Iraq was his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams) until he spied his tattoo.
Now Jacob is running into demented vets on the street. They’re wearing combat jackets and hoodies, and their messages are all over the place.
“Your brother’s here…You’re brother’s in trouble. I can show you.”
And then there are the hooded ghouls who invade the house he shares with wife Sam (Nicole Beharie). Unmasking one is Jacob’s first clue that he’s not dealing with something of this world.
“Better keep your mouth shut” is what he’s told. By the house-breaker who vanishes into the trees.
Who to confide in? Sam? She’s busy with their baby who was born when he was overseas.
There’s Hoffman, the VA pharmacist (Guy Burnet). And there’s the psychotherapist (Michael Panes) helping Jacob deal with whatever level of post traumatic stress he’s suffering.
Will either have the answers when that one traumatized comrade of his brother’s (Joseph Sikora) leads him to his dead brother, hiding out in the bowels of The City Too Busy to Hate.
Isaac? You were dead!
Bringing the “dead” sibling home merely intensifies the hallucinations, the flashbacks — to their childhood together, to Jacob’s wedding day with Sam, to combat or field surgery in Iraq.
These flashbacks — machine fire, visions of choppers, the works — are so intense they can kill a man. Jacob’s not the only one having them. There’s this anti-psychotic drug,HDA, “The Ladder,” that was out, then pulled, that seems like a clue.
Rosenthal’s film, based on Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe’s rewrite of the 1990 “Jacob’s Ladder,” grabs us with a gory rib-spreader surgical opening and then settles into the moody terrors that Jacob won’t speak about, so certain is he that all this supernatural stuff is really roiling around him.
Would a doctor REALLY believe clerical mistakes let him think his brother has been dead?
“I just want to know what’s going on!”
As in the original “Ladder,” the one person who might have answers that provide solace is named “Louis.” Then, that was Jacob’s chiropractor-protector and father-confessor, played by the great Danny Aiello.
Here Louis is a similarly calming presence, his psychotherapist. Character actor Michael Panes (he was Gore Vidal in “Infamous”) summons up the soothing tones of Louis’s profession to talk Jacob off his psychic ledge.
“We all see things,” he says, quoting Medieval theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart to his fellow physician. “The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of yourself that refuses to let go.”
The first “Jacob’s Ladder” earned mixed notices upon release, and never quite achieved “cult” status. This version is no better in many ways, and altering its twist ending isn’t much of an improvement.
Honestly, it seems to muddle the whole wrestling with mortality and “what comes after” thing, aside from Louis’s little speech.
But there isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence, sexuality and drug content
Cast: Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie, Joseph Sikora, Karla Souza, Ninja N. Devoe
Credits: Directed by David M. Rosenthal, script by Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe, based on the Bruce Joel Rubin script for the 1990 film. A Vertical Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:29
As I twiddle my thumbs, waiting for the embargo to clear for “The Kitchen,” allow me to share the fond hope that this, the latest 70s-80s music film to demand our attention, will be worth the wait.
A Pakistani Briton in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain discovers an American voice that speaks to his very soul, the longing, the aching loneliness, the frustration of, as Harlan Ellison so aptly put it, having “no mouth but I must scream.”
Sure, it’s titled after my least favorite Springsteen song. But this trailer has a sheen of sheer joy about it. Hope it’s better than “Yesterday” or “Rocketman,” but we’ll see.
Supporting players Rob Brydon and Hayley Atwell are the only “names” in the cast.
“Blinded by the Light” opens Aug. 16.
It started life as a BBC sci-fi radio comedy, became a series of novels, was adapted for British TV and eventually, finally and AFTER the death of its creator, Douglas Adams, became a sort of half-hearted movie.
Now Hulu has a producer/show runner with “Lost” and “Jack Ryan” experience and a screenwriter with “Wonder Woman” bonafides and a cunning plan to put “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on streaming TV.
All well and good. Fine. Etc.
But if I might make a suggestion. Why not take the vintage 1970s radio series, impressive, funny and dazzling in its own way, with Simon Jones and voice-actors as varied as Jim Broadbent, Rula Lenska and Jonathan Pryce in bit parts, and ANIMATE it?
That could be a hoot. And if there’s one thing the earlier visual and even literary versions of the concept have proven, the RADIO SERIES was its natural format — aural effects, verbal wit delivered with a deliriously English deadpan.
No, they won’t do that.Still, they’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect Arthur Dent than Martin Freeman, as Simon Jones will certainly be deemed too old to play the part for Hulu.
Here, by the way, was my DEFINITIVE and widely published wire service story/profile of the star and the director and others from when the movie came out waaaaaaay back in 2005.
You can’t help but notice Disney’s mission creep as it dives deeper into the Marvel business, the gold mine that has made the studio forgo pretty much everything else — save for remaking their animated classics as “live action” (not really) features.
What happened to kids’ fare, the non animated side of their original business?
Two franchises that the “Absent Minded Professor” “Escape from Witch Mountain” company could have made, but that Fox did instead, are now in Disney’s possession. So why not remake “Home Alone” and the far more recent “Night at the Museum?” That’s the thinking, anyway.
https://t.co/ZIO3T9Y9RD https://t.co/WTBwgFIVCd https://twitter.com/THR/status/1158931041601671168?s=17
For the first time in eight years,
Netflix lost subscribers last quarter. Over 130,000 dropped them as the service lost popular series like “The Office” and “Friends.”
As others say, “That’s just the beginning.”
As in, expect the streaming service to start shedding subscribers every quarter, and the bottomless well of subscriber/production money will have to be spent on a LOT more original content.
Rising competition could put Netflix in it’s production place. With less money to lavish on big names, Netflix will be in the position of a lot of small studios. They can’t get much of an audience for their product. Alfonso Cuaron wouldn’t be able to money muscle his way to a best picture nomination for a movie few saw and nobody remembers, for instance.
Scorsese’s blank check for”The Irishman” will have to pay off, every time, to get the amount of attention it will take to lure subscribers who used to sign up because “30 Rock,” Ross and Monica and “The Office” were there.
The paradigm is shifting. Again.
https://t.co/NJzNIYXHWc https://twitter.com/Medium/status/1158879372415250432?s=17
For an 80 minute movie, “Wicked Witches,” retitled from the ever-so-British “The Witches of Dumpling Farm,” certainly does dawdle along.
I had all but despaired of it ever getting up and running long before its nervy, stomach-churning chase and finale.
But what a finish!
Blood and guts yanked out with jagged teeth by women whose eyes are pools of the most spine-chilling black. It probably didn’t take much “pretending” for star Duncan Casey to shriek like a frightened girl, bellow like a man straining to get through not just the night but the next few seconds and scream like a hunted animal wailing at the prospect of never escaping the clutches of…those “Wicked Witches.”
The Bahamian-born Casey plays Irishman Mark, whom we meet as he yanks off his wedding band and drops it out of the car window.
He’s driving from the wrong side of the vehicle, which tells us he’s in Jolly Olde. A quick call to his mate from his days as a carefree bachelor ensures he’ll have a place to stay tonight.
But something in the way the wild-eyed Ian (Justin Marosa) says, “I’ll see you when you get here…MATE,” sets one’s teeth on edge. Not Mark’s, just “one’s.”
Mark and Ian used to hang on Dumpling Farm in Cambridgeshire, out in crop circle country on the B-roads a ways from town. But walking up on Ian, chopping wood and muttering in strange tongues, should be Mark’s second red alert.
Something has changed here. Ian, who still likes to get high, is a part of that something. Laughing maniacally while stoned is new to his repertoire.
Mark would love to host a “big party” at the place, and plans are made to round up the old gang. But these nightmares he’s having are turning into daymares. He sees bloodied women taking a bite out of men, and it’s keeping him up all night.
Yes, it’s definitely the nightmares, and not the blasts of beer and blow.
The party is where the strangers show up, a clutch of bombshells led by a woman nobody calls the high priestess (a feral Samantha Schnitzler) and including a spooky blonde beauty (Jasmine Clark) Mark has seen around town.
The effects are simple but chilling — the fake teeth, the blood, those damned “Blair Witch” Wiccan stick-models, the alarming close-ups, the isolating wide shots.
For all the efforts to inject humor belatedly into the third act, it’s the sheer terror of the situation and fear that there is no escape that drives characters’ reactions — which can be, even in the direst panic, funny.
I fret about actors’ unwillingness to let it all hang out when playing characters confronted with the supernatural and their own mortality. Duncan Casey puts on a clinic as to how far over-the-top reasonable human reactions to things that cannot be should be played.
The witches, Schnitzler and Clark, speaking with disembodied Satanic baritones, grow more frightening the longer the film goes on.
But the drawn-out chase, above and below ground, of the third act needed to begin earlier — much earlier. The Pickering Brothers’ debut feature spends too much time setting everything up. No, that first 55 minutes or so doesn’t give us deep insights to anyone. Mark is a womanizer, and is still friends with other womanizers. And…?
The picture shortchanges women in general and the witchy women who leave their brooms at home when they’re hunting in particular. No “ex,” no female friends at the party, just guests who show up, dominate the proceedings and submit to their animal feeding urges.
Still, “Wicked Witches” isn’t a total write-off. But when your movie’s this short, getting to the point, giving us “the good stuff” and all that jazz has got to happen earlier.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Duncan Casey, Jasmine Clark, Samantha Schnitzler, Justin Marosa, Kitt Proudfoot
Credits: Written and directed by Martin Pickering and Mark Pickering. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:20
There is comfort and little risk in rooting for sports superpowers — the Patriots, Manchester Uniteds, Dukes and Alabamas of this world.
But when there is no struggle there is no pathos. And in rooting, when there is no risk, there is no glory.
“The Bromley Boys” is about one lad’s slavish devotion to a faithless lover — Bromley F.C. (football club) in the Southeast of Greater London, North Kent for you geographers. Dave Roberts’ football memoir about frustration, awkwardness, social ostracization and first love makes for a sentimental and twee British period piece about the worst football club of them all.
Forget the century of Chicago Cubs misery, the ongoing agonies of the Chargers, the pointless existence of the Charlotte Hornets. Bromley, founded in the late 19th century, had to be the most frustrating underdogs to ever tie one’s sporting fate to.
Not that young Dave (Brenock O’Connor of “Game of Thrones”) planned it that way. He fell in love with the game when England won its last World Cup (1966). At 11, he’d have rather rooted for Tottenham Hotspur,” “like my friends.”
“You don’t have any friends,” grumbles his ever-“disgruntled” dad (Alan Davies).
“What about the team down the road, Bromley?” offers Mum (Martine McCutcheon), ever the peacemaker.
“Nobody supports Bromley,” the kid protests. “Bromley’s rubbish!”
“FOOTball is rubbish!” thunders Dad, and that’s that.
Only it’s not. Doting Mum is all about encouraging the kid and buys Dave the “uniform” of British football fans (a scarf).
“You can’t choose who you’re going to fall in love with,” the adult Dave (also Alan Davies) narrates. Because that’s what this fandom became.
Mum & Son cook up a years-long ruse to cover Dave’s obsessive attendance at the tiny, tattered home field for Bromley on Hayes Lane. As the years pass, he will become the oldest Cub Scout in Britain, donning the hat, shirt and kerchief, slipping out to meetings and “projects” every Saturday. That’s what they tell Dad, anyway.
Dave’s obsession gets him noticed at school, in all the worst ways. He practices being interviewed about his “career,” and thus talks to himself. A lot. Even the girls bully him.
By age 15, he’s lost for life over Bromley, then a semi-pro team in the Isthmian League, and so very bad that they could lose even their low-team-on-the-totem-pole standing and be “relegated.”
That’s the very year (1970) that Dave falls in with motley adult Bromley fanatics (TJ Herbert, Mark Dymond and Ewen MacIntosh). He’s egged on into protesting the team’s woes. Losing to the likes of Dulwich, Ilford, Hitchin Town, Barking, Corinthian Casuals, Maidstone United and Tooting & Mitcham should get the printer turned part-time manager fired, right?
That puts Dave in the field of vision of team chairman and compulsive gambler Charlie McQueen (the amusingly splenetic Jamie Forman of “Layer Cake”). And that’s how Dave meets McQueen’s daughter, smart but wallflowerish Ruby (Savannah Baker).
Whatever Dave sees in Bromley, Ruby sees in Dave. As in “God knows what.”
The jokes in this tale “based on real events…and some rumours” are of the slight and sly variety.
Dave’s self-made protest T-shirt to oust manager Dick Ellis has “Dick Out” written on it.
School interludes show Dave getting pelted with wads of paper for promoting Bromley, and getting frequent canings from the headmaster for interrupting class to promote Bromley.
He sticks his foot in it autograph hunting when West Ham United comes to play a “friendly” and all their stars skip the trip.
“Excuse me, is anybody GOOD playing today?”
The football stuff sends him into the near-madness of total obsession — sneaking into the chairman’s office to gain intel, spreading “rumours,” fretting over the fate of his favorite player, “Stoney” Stonebridge (Ross Anderso , the very picture of 1970s mustachiod dash).
Ruby? He just uses her to access her Dad, who is plainly spending beyond his means — an Aston Martin, a mansion, a Russian trophy wife played by Anna Danshina.
To “come of age,” Dave’s got to reconcile his obsessions and become a more considerate person, maybe find out why Dad has a limp, why Mum indulges his football mania, why his teachers all find him a waste of space. He needs to see what Ruby sees in him.
“Twee” is just a more polite description of British comedies that err on the side of “cutesy.” The almost-omnipresent narration here takes on “A Christmas Story” incredulity, but never adds much that is funny to the proceedings.
The entire picture is basically one big gag that has a hint of “inside joke” to it, as any Brit could tell you Bromley was a laughingstock for decades, and the kid’s into Bromley, of all clubs, in its direst state.
But young O’Connor has a pale, walking bean-pole awkwardness about him, and uses that ungainly appearance to good effect. Nerdy glasses or not, rich and pretty Ruby wouldn’t give him the time of day.
Except that he’s a lost cause. And like Bromley F.C. circa 1970, there is glory and romance in falling for something or someone that’s going to challenge your faith and maybe break your heart.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Brenock O’Connor, Savannah Baker, Martine McCutcheon, Jamie Foreman, Alan Davies, Anna Danshina
Credits: Directed by Steve Kelly, script by Warren Dudley, based on the Dave Roberts memoir. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:46
Movie Nation 