An August period piece crime gang wars thriller?
That’s good counter programming, I say.
Good trip of leading ladies && Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss.
A woman directed it, so Domhnall Gleeson is the potential underworld love interest. Sensitive gingers are the best!
“The Kitchen” opens Friday.
This has 4chan/incel insensate corner of horror fandom written all over it.
Torture porn? Monstrous male Hunter/killers going after women, one at a time, until the womenwork together?
That’s the sales pitch for “The Furies,” at least in this trailer.
Contrary to the T-shirt slogan, sometimes finding “your tribe” is just a baby step.
The hard work of figuring out how you fit into it, how much of its practices and dogma you embrace, has just begun.
“This is Not Berlin” is an immersive Mexican drama about being young, creative and not knowing where you belong. Hari Sama’s fourth film is about sexual awakening, drugs, the underground club scene and homosexuality in 1986 World Cup-mad Mexico City.
Unpredictably plotted — no, it’s not your standard issue “coming of age/coming out” gay romance — and subtly acted, it’s an engaging excursion in the “fluid” or “on the spectrum” sexuality as we understand it today, as experienced by a teen 33 years ago.
Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León) is an electronics and engineering whiz, bored by his private school and not quite settled in, even with his pals.
We meet him in the middle of a slow motion schoolboys’ brawl he is removed from, above it all and refusing to take a swing. His reaction to these high school vs. high school riots is to faint.
His friends, quick as they are to pepper their conversation with gay bashing, don’t make a lot of it. But they could, if they gave it a thought.
Carlos is tall, thin, with girlishly long curly hair and delicate features. His fainting, he insists (in Spanish, with English subtitles), is because “my highly intelligent brain” tells him “these beatings no sense.”
Musical cues about what’s going on in that car he, his best friend Gera (José Antonio Toledano) and several others pile into include Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” blasting out of the car stereo and Carlos insisting to Gera, later, that this Ten Years After tune, “I’d Love to Change the World,” is “one of the most kick-ass songs ever!”
Rob Halford, lead singer of Judas Priest, came out some years after the movie is set, and “I’d Love to Change the World” has lyrics about “dykes and fairies.” Subtle.
Carlos tinkers inventing battery powered gadgets — robot dolls and the like — and can fix anything electronic. And he insists the only thing that keeps him from professing his love for Gera’s punk poetess older sister (Ximena Romo, in Chrissie Hynde bangs) is the fact that she’s “my best friend’s sister.”
But when her band (Manifesto) needs its keyboard fixed, that is Carlos and Gera’s entré to the clubs where Rita and her crew party and perform. That rocks our curious hero’s world — gay men dancing and making out, artists debating the boundaries of art and politics, creative folks creating all around him.
And lots of drugs and nudity, to boot.
Nico (Mauro Sanchez Navarro), their ring leader, takes an interest in Carlos even as Gera is worried about the stigma of “gay nightclub” following them back to school.
As his widowed mother (Marina de Tavira) has crawled into a bottle (booze and prescription pills), Carlos is free to explore this world, with or without Gera or Rita’s help.
“This is Not Berlin” — the title comes from an art dealer’s furious dismissal of art/performance mashup “style” of Nico & Co. — is about that journey.
While this Hari Sama (“The Dream of Lu,” “Awakening Dust”) film is no “Y Tu Mamá También,” it features understated performances that capture the figuring-it-out-as-we-go nature of “confused” youth, and an absolutely fascinating milieu.
Carlos may crank out toys and stage effects for Manifesto as his ticket in, but soon he’s swept up in orgiastic body painting “happenings” shot on grainy video for other, bigger works to come.
Rita and Nico and Maud (Klaudia Garcia), who supervises the makeover/transformation that we and his classmates see in Carlos’s hair, makeup, etc., are political because they absolutely have to be.
“They’re KILLING us!” is a frequent refrain of their protest pieces. A couple of those are dazzling stunts that would stop traffic and make headlines, even today.
Sama plays Carlos’s “cool” uncle, guiding his engineering enterprise, riding a motorbike and giving the kid his first joint. As a co-writer/director, Sama gives Carlos’s coming of age not so much a burning-the-candle-as-both-ends urgency as a thirsty curiosity. Carlos is lapping up everything around him like a kid finding a new candy store.
The film’s third act surprises are fascinating post Golden Age of Queer Cinema choices.
No, this may NOT be “Berlin,” legendary for its sexual, artistic and cinematic “freedom” at various times in its history. But “This is Not Berlin” bracingly suggests that the same searching and exploring was going on in places far afield from the city that inspired Christopher Isherwood and later, “Cabaret.” The young people of 1980s Catholic Mexico City, like the post-Franco Spain of Pedro Almodóvar, had their own run of making up for lost time.
MPAA Rating: violence, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, nudity
Cast: Xabiani Ponce de León, José Antonion Toledano, Klaudia Garcia, Ximena Romo, Maura Sanchez Navarro
Credits: Directed by Hari Sama, script by Rodrigo Ordoñez, Max Zunino and Hari Sama. A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:52
Because it’s Mexico City, 1986, as if any gay men of that time and place would confuse the two capitals.
Your first thought is, “That could never happen today, the country’s too polarized,”and then a montage showing how violently divided America was back then makes you wonder.
Watching “Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation” the weekend after another blast of American mass shootings is the ultimate disconnect. How DID they do that without cops, metal detectors, without some hippie-hating gun-nut goaded into shooting the place up?
You remember the music. But no other film has ever immersed itself in the logistical disaster turned into humanitarian miracle that this seminal event was.
And it’s taken 50 years, but perhaps the culture is ready to move beyond grinning at the event’s court jester Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), and look at him as the hero of Woodstock, its patron saint, the embodiment of what separated it and every other major outdoor concert of its era, especially Altamont.
This PBS film, airing Monday night, does not displace Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 Oscar-winning classic of the genre, it complements it — provides context, treats it as the ancient history it now is.
“Three Days” is much more about an era, of “The Generation Gap,” the Vietnam War, protests and assassinations. It dwells on the backstage life, the grand moments of humanity displayed by concertgoers, concert promoters, conservative townsfolk and New York’s hippie-hating Republican oligarch of a governor.
It’s an oral history, with plenty of archival footage (Wadleigh’s crew included young Martin Scorsese, and shot MILES of film) and period TV interviews underscored by the key team that made the show happen, a few who performed and legions of those who went, “pilgrims, on a pilgrimage” — some identified, others not — their voices painting an aural memory of a signal event in their young lives.
One thinks of Henry’s V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare, of those of us who didn’t get to go holding “their manhoods cheap” whenever one of the chosen few who did speaks of Woodstock.
The word that sticks out, underlined and circled in my notes from watching the movie, is “LOGISTICS.” The footage assembled by PBS co-directors Barack Goodman and Jamila Ephron captures an unfolding disaster, where “everything that could possibly go wrong was happening,” from tiny, reactionary Wallkill, N.Y. pulling approval for the show at the last minute to the losing race to prep a site in bucolic Bethel, New York for the coming onslaught.
You may tear up, as I did, at a first glimpse of that “natural amphitheater” on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm. But a tidal wave of OSHA violations are here for us to marvel over, frantic crews building a stage, taking every safety shortcut imaginable as they do, giving up on building a fence so that the promoters could collect tickets and at least break even on the financial debacle they were presiding over.
The greatest traffic jam in history, rain turning an unhoused city of 400-450,000 into a mud bowl, running out of food, medical supplies — the drugs, the nudity — all footnotes in Wadleigh’s documentary that step front and center in “Three Days that Defined a Generation.”
The music has become a cultural cliche, so much so that mere samples of Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joe Cocker are enough to conjure up what we remember or have heard about the show over the past 50 years. They’re musical shorthand for “Woodstock.”
Snippets of footage capture the chaos created by the flood of people and everything that goes wrong and most-famous-promoter (one of four) Michael Lang’s sweet-spirited but out of his depth responses. A glimpse of the original super-promoter Bill Graham showing up, as a guest, and laying down the law about what was needed, on the spot, reminds us of what a near-disaster this all was.
“Helicopters!”
And then there’s Wavy Gravy and his merry, enterprising Hog Farm commune, the police force that regarded itself as a “please force,” as in “Please, would you do this,” please would you help with that. What Baby Boomers came to call “The Spirit of Woodstock” is embodied by this goofball’s canny grasp of the situation and what was necessary to keep things cool and mellow.
Drug trips by the tens of thousands were triaged at Hog Farm’s backstage encampment, holding hands with kids lost in an LSD haze. And when those stoners came down, “See that guy coming in the tent? That was you, three hours ago, man. Go help him the way we helped you.”
I was delighted by how funny this “Woodstock” is, the hilarious ailments listed on draft notice medical exams, the boys and girls “exposed” to more nudity than they’d ever seen in the pages of “Playboy.”
I was shocked at how emotional the film, covering familiar ground with a lot of familiar footage, could be. Revel in the thrilling singing of Baez, the stunning showmanship of Sly and the Family Stone, the lightning emanating from Jimi Hendrix’s Fender Stratocaster, a beatific Grace Slick, worn out and starting a Jefferson Airplane set at dawn, beaming like a consummate professional just doing a gig — in front of 400,000+ muddy, weary and sometimes strung-out American youth.
And the film sharply underscores why this strictly subcultural event — under 30, overwhelmingly white, drug-friendly and left-leaning — has cast such a broad shadow over American history. It didn’t “define a generation” by representing all of it, but by what it brought out in those touched by it, old and young, urban and rural, leftist or rightist, growing in legend as it fades into the haze of memory.
MPAA Rating: drug abuse, nudity
Cast: David Crosby, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Michael Lang and Carol Green
Credits: Directed by Barak Goodman, Jamila Ephron. A PBS/”American Experience”
Running time: 1:46
At the Timicua Arts Foundation in Orlando for a special showing of this new epic 50th anniversary doc.
I’ve had an abiding interest in Woodstock, tracking down fans who went and interviewing Baez and Arlo, Levon, Ravi Shankar and Richie Havens, Melanie and Graham Nash who performed there.
And there’s this unit publicist I used to work through whenever movies would film in Florida. It turns out, before she was the helpful PR person who got me on sets and interviews with directors and film stars, Carol Green was in Bethel, New York in the summer of ’69, cooking for the producers and crew who built the temporary venue that made history.
Who knew? She’s in the movie.
My REVIEW of “Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation” is viewable via this link.
Here’s the trailer to the PBS film.
He made it to 94, a long life and a seminal career. From the shape of docs to “reality TV,” it all harks back to cinema veritae, which Pennebaker perfected half a century ago.
“The War Room” and “Don’t Look Back” are (with partner Chris Hegedus) his big statement pictures, but there were others.
From THR “At a ‘Don’t Look Back’ screening, Dylan told him he would “write down all of the things we have to change” on a yellow pad. “At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said, ‘That’s it.’” https://t.co/2bYE15alLj https://twitter.com/MikeBarnes4/status/1157762183712739329?s=17
A big Thursday night and huge Friday have put “Hobbs & Shaw” on track to clear $60 million on its opening weekend. Very good. Not great for a “Fast/Furious” pic, so at least Vin Diesel is thrilled.
“Lion King” is adding another $37 and change. It never ends.
“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is still three hours long, so figure that into its $19.3 second weekend. That’s a
53% drop, weekend to weekend.
A decent hold, not a dazzling one. It will stick around through August, anyway.
“Spider-Man” is still making bank, “Yesterday” and “The Farewell” are in the top ten one more weekend, films with real low budget staying power.
https://t.co/qEqvWrrRsF https://t.co/Fl5pxAiLXT https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1157697914753490944?s=17
The kids who grew up on TV’s “Dora the Explorer” are in college, now.
So selling the pre tween Dora to them in movie form was a non starter.
Make Dora more mature. Tween to teen. Turn her into a Tomb Raider?
Ok.
Still not sure who this movie is for.
Paramount is uncertain, too. They’re screening it and embargoing SOME reviews, with a few reviews already out.
Smells like teen spirit? Smells like fear.
Once upon a time, in a much more segregated Hollywood, Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby starred in a buddy comedy about two working Joes who lose a winning lottery ticket while out at an Uptown club.
An Odyssey through a world the movies never showed — hustlers and hoodlums and hotties and heaven knows who all and what all, all black — ensued and a classic was born.
Various African American Stars have looked into remaking “Uptown Saturday Night,” most famously Will Smith.
Now a “Blackish” writer, the director of “Dope,” Rick Famuyiwa, and superdooperstar Kevin Hart are on board.
Do you go older with casting the co star, maybe Anthony Anderson, or find somebody younger than Hart to pair up with him?
Hannibal Burress!
Will Smith is hanging on as a producer.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/rick-famuyiwa-direct-uptown-saturday-night-remake-1228766
Movie Nation 