Movie Nation

https://kotaku.com/sonic-the-hedgehog-movie-design-to-be-changed-following-1834488203

Love that Gurinder Chadha. The director of “Bend it Like Beckham” got the rights to some pretty good music for this version of a true story. Damn.

The New York Times says publishing houses have finally taken the Farrow family side about Woody Allen’s alleged child abise. And so it ends. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/movies/woody-allen-memoir.amp.html

Since time immemorial, this truism has ostensibly marked the difference between TeeVee and movies.

Television, even “It’s not television, it’s HBO,” is a close-up medium, more about intimacy, “neck-up acting” than film, which even in the HD-bigger screen era, still has the edge in terms of sweep and scope.

The action auteur Walter Hill, one of the few living filmmakers with the knack for making a Western look like a Western, gave us “Wild Bill,” which was the template for TV’s “Deadwood,” which he had a hand in producing (the pilot, setting the tone).

Sepia-tinged, dusty, grimy, rough and ready, “Wild Bill” looked like the Frontier Perdition you kind of imagine the real Deadwood must have been — earth tones, wood and dirt and mud and rough fabrics and dimly-lit saloons and gunsmoke and blood.

If HBO was going to all the trouble of making a stand-alone sequel, you’d think they’d bring Hill back as the “consulting producer” he was for the original pilot.

“Deadwood: The Movie” looks scrubbed and sanitized — mainly because of the “end of that era” civilization that is coming to the town — and has barely a hint of rough trade about it. It looks like what it is, a TV movie.

Here’s a mob comedy as patchwork as its title –– “79 Parts.”

It’s a pieced-together period piece stuffed with characters, with multiple narrators and story threads, a “ticking clock” deadline or two that no one remembers and a hodgepodge of vintage vehicles dating from the 40s through the very late ’70s.

And none of it, not one moment of screen time, delivers anything resembling a laugh.

The two narrators are Slattery (Aidan Redmond, interesting), an Irish mobster who runs loan shark and chop shop operations (the “79 Parts” of the title) in his corner of “New York” in 1979, and Jack Anderson (Ryan O’Callaghan, meh), a one-time aspiring artist who is in the home stretch in law school because he’d love to get his crooked dad (Eric Roberts) out of prison.

Slattery needs to keep his young Italian immigrant mistress (Daniela Mastropietro) happy and his mob-connected wife (Lisa Regina) from killing him. Mob life?

“In your 20s, the job used to be sexy. Now that we’re in our 40s, it’s lost a certain luster.”

Anderson, no relation to the famous newspaper columnist of the era (apparently) needs $5,000 to pay off his last semester of law school. And darn it, let’s throw in that he’s “still a virgin,” because that’s what his narration tells us. His three-piece tan corduroy suit explains that.

The connection between the two is Gino, whose grandad (Tony LoBianco) is also in prison, and whose aunt is Slattery’s mob-made wife. Gino (Johnny Solo, badabing badaboom) is a classmate and hustler who’s always dragging Jack to the track.

Gino works for Slattery, whose marriage has created a combined business, “Paddys and Wops” chopping cars, using muscle and making threats. He vouches for Jack’s loan from Slattery, which Gino plans on gambling on “fixed” horse races with.

What could go wrong?

There are also INS agents sniffing around Slattery and his Italian baker mistress, assorted mugs and thugs, women who misuse Jack and vast collections of street walkers.

That may be the most accurate thing about this “period piece,” which looks like a film student’s idea of what the ’70s were like — a film student who doesn’t like doing research (the cars, the CARS).

Not that director Ari Taub is a film student.

It’s a movie of garish colors, big and badly-knotted ties (on the money) and hooker-wear straight out of “Starsky & Hutch.” It’s all shot in a could-be-anywhere Netherworld of gutted factories, abandoned railroad tracks and streets that haven’t been driven on in years. You shot in Brooklyn and this is what you got?

Every now and then, a character is given a funny name.

“Eight Track! Don’t touch the whores!”

The script’s idea of a sight gag is having the INS agents tie a string to a hubcap and drag it in front of suspects, looking for “a nibble” so they can hook them.

Hilarious.

All kidding or ridiculing aside, this is what could have worked. That milieu, that “Fort Apache — The Bronx” era New York at its nadir, chop shops and ranting, stereotypical Irish mobsters, maybe in comical conflict with stereotypical Italian ones.

Redmond needed more coherent lines than this for Slattery — “They say a leopard can’t change his spots. Everybody ends up where he’s s’posed to.” Say what now? Still, there’s something possibly worth working with here in all this unfunny clutter.

So many characters don’t work, so many lines don’t land, so much casting (cameos by Roberts, LoBianco and Sandra Bernhard) seems fruitless.

The “parts” might be here — a few of them, anyway. They just needed cleverer people to put all 79 of them together better.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex and profanity

Cast: Ryan O’Callaghan, Aidan Redmond, Kathrine Narducci, Sandra Bernhard, Tony LoBiancp and Eric Roberts

Credits: Directed by Ari Taub, script by Chuck McMahon.   A Factory Film Studio release.

Running time:

There’s a squishy wistfulness that hangs over “Tell It to the Bees,” a same sex romance set in small town Scotland in the 1950s. Flashes of magical realism gently but gratingly clash with drab melodrama. Winning performances by leads Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger can’t banish it.

But the handsomely-mounted period production has its rewards and the finale manages a nice messiness that undoes some of what’s trite and far-fetched that’s come before it.

Jean Markham (the Oscar and Golden Globe-winning Paquin) has returned to the town she left decades before, taking over her late father’s medical practice. It’s 1952, and whatever she left town for — and we can guess that — she felt the pull of purpose drawing her back.

“These women, they work,  keep quiet and they don’t complain,” she tells a friend. “think I could make a difference.”

Lydia (Grainger, of “The Finest Hours,” “Tulip Fever” and TV’s “Bonnie & Clyde”) is one of those women, an outsider who moved here, putting in a full day on the looms at the textile mill, indulging her curious son Charlie (Gregor Selkirk), weeping when she thinks he’s not looking.

She’s married a lout (Emun Elliott) who refers to their child as “YOUR son” as he walks out on them. How will she pay the rent?

Charlie is how Jean and Lydia meet. His hobbies are Sherlock Holmes novels and getting into brawls with boys who disparage his Mum. One of those fights puts him in the doctor’s care.

And he and the doctor connect over a shared fascination with bees.

“My father used to say, ‘You tell the bees your secrets and they’ll never go away,'” Jean tells him. So Charlie takes to telling the bees his secrets.

But his mother and Jean are conjuring up secrets all their own. The whispering about both only grows as the homeless Lydia and Charlie move in with kind-hearted and well-off Jean.

The whispering, before and after, is about pretty much what you expect, thanks to the predictable arc of Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s screenplay.

So are the obstacles to their “forbidden love” in an era when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain and small towns were the last place you wanted to test that.

“Those sort of people don’t change their minds,” Jean’s solicitor-friend (Steven Robertson) counsels.

It’s a romance of tasteful love scenes and brittle bigotry, with jarring transitions and a messy climax and that messier finale I mentioned earlier. Lydia’s a bit of a party girl, and seems more instantly-attracted to Jean than such stories traditionally play out. Her brutish soon-to-be-ex is a caricature of villainy, checked-out and moved-on, but still wanting control of this woman and son he refuses to support.

Some of that can be attributed to what might be our unreliable narrator (the adult Charlie). He’s pulling this all together from memory, and “The line between what I saw and what I thought I saw is blurred.”

Director Annabel Jankel broke through in films with the Dennis Quaid/Meg Ryan remake of “D.O.A.” in the 1980s, and whatever she can’t finesse in the script she compensates for in tone. This is a verdant, conservative place more comfortable with whispers and hissed insults than confrontation.

But even Jankel can’t smooth over the eye-rolling moments in the film’s climax. That doesn’t kill “Tell It to the Bees,” which passes otherwise without objection. But it does tend to rob one of much enthusiasm in endorsing it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult subject matter

Cast: Anna Paquin, Holliday Grainger, Gregor Selkirk, Emun Elliott

Credits:Directed by Annabel Jankel, script by Henrietta Ashworth, Jessica Ashworth. A Good Deed Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:46

Kaya Scoledario and Barry Pepper star in this thriller, which captures two of the great menaces to Florida in one movie. Sam Raimi produced it.

This creeper “Crawl” opens July 12.

The warning signs are there.

“Uglydolls” is an animated film from a studio start-up with no history in the medium.

The financing is mostly Chinese, with “The Chinese Amazon.com,” Alibaba, in a lead role. Why does that matter? Who does Hollywood never fail to take to the film production cleaners? “New Money.”

The selling point is the music, tunes by Christopher Lenertz and others, sung by big names like Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monae and Blake Shelton.

So there’s every reason to expect this to suck, completely and utterly. But the tunes become a sort of saving grace, the animation’s not bad and the there’s enough slapstick to keep tiny tykes distracted.

And their parents could use a nap, which this death-itself screenplay delivers for anyone over the age of 10.

It’s about a happy, cardboard box town where discarded toys live and laugh and sing.

But Moxy — yes, a LOT of the names are “literal” and on the nose — longs to fulfill every doll’s destiny, to “get chosen.” Since she’s voiced by Kelly Clarkson, she sings about that longing, to be in “the Big World” where “there’s a child for every doll, and a doll for every child.”

Mayor Ox (Blake Shelton) can’t shake that belief. Pals like Wage (Wanda Sykes), Babo (Gabriel Iglesias), one-eyed Ugly Dog (Pitbull) and Lucky Bat (Leehom Wang) can’t dissuade her from exploring the mysterious “flower” from which new residents of Uglyville arrive.

It’s a garbage chute. She can’t see that, but we can. And when she convinces her pals to see if the Big World is on the other side of it, they tag along.

That’s how they end up at the Institute of Perfection,” where beautiful, cookie-cutter Bratz-styled dolls are lorded over by teen-idolist Lou (Nick Jonas).

Lou preaches “Pretty makes perfect,” and he sings “You’re U.G.L.Y., and that’s the ugly truth” to the new arrivals, among other tunes.

Moxy and her pals have to pass “quality control” and run “The Gauntlet,” run by Lou and his Mean Girls, to acquire “the greatest experience a doll can know,” being loved by a child.

The plush “ugly” dolls are rather formless felt concoctions. The “perfect” dolls has lovely yarn-texture hair and dazzling dance moves.

As I said, the songs here do the heavy lifting (“Spy Kids” creator Robert Rodriguez cooked up the story). We get the longing song, the villain’s obstacle song, the makeover song, the fulfillment finale.

A cute cover? Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.”

One of the handful of laughs is a concert cliche from the rock Dark Ages. Lou inspires “MARRY me, Lou!” screams from his admirers every time he sings. Save for one, who shouts “Freebird!”

The other “As I said” here is this skews very young. If they’re old enough for school, the kids are old enough to be bored here.

But hey, it’s better than “UglyDolls on Ice” or “Uglyville’s Got No Talent.” Theoretically.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and brief action

Cast: The voices of Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monae, Pitbull, Blake Shelton, Gabriel Iglesias, Wanda Sykes, Lizzo and Emma Roberts

Credits:Directed by Kelly Asbury, script by Allison Peck, story by Robert Rodriguez. An STX release.

Running time: 1:27

Veteran character actor Aldis Hodge has the title role, that of an aspiring football star arrested and unjustly convicted, losing his dream and a good chunk of his life to “a broken system.” Freeman is an inmate who gives him the perseverance to endure the unthinkable, Kinnear leads the “Innocence Project” legal time trying to clear the name, “Brian Banks.”

An August Release, a true story.

So funny. So cute. So very Canadian. Pikachu uses… Foot Massage? “Detective Pokemon Character” opens May 10. https://youtu.be/bo1YKTvM2Uc