Co-stars in this film about a hitman who might have been involved in taking out Jimmy Hoffa include Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale and Ray Romano?
“The Irishman” feels a little “old men playing young toughs,” but maybe the gravitas these Scorsese vets bring will compensate for that. Coming to select theaters, and then Netflix, this fall.
Let’s start with a couple of givens. Any time I channel surf by “Jackie Brown” I stop. It is Tarantino’s best film. Still.
I enjoyed the suspenseful interrogations of “Basterds,” and little else, the minimalism and edge of “Reservoir Dogs.” Hated “Hateful” and “Django.”
And I always enjoy those trademark pop culture riffing monologues and dialogues, “your father’s watch” and “Royale with cheese,” the Tim Roth/Amanda Plummer open in “Pulp.” “Sicilians” in “”True Romance.”
So, not a hater and I didn’t “hate” “Once Upon a Time…”
But there is a lot to irritate and make you roll your eyes at and grind your teeth about if you’re not swooning over the recreation of 1969 LA like too many critics to count. Nostalgia is overrated.
Things I hated?
1) Where IS that signature Tarantino dialogue/monologue? It’s not the dizzy Pitt/Dern duologue (talking at cross purposes). The TV director Sam Wanamaker-Rick Dalton pep talks were good, but nothing you will ever quote aside from “You’re better than that.” It’s not in the Pacino/Pitt/DiCaprio scene. Little of the dialogue in this picture can hold a tune, much less “sing.”
2) The voice-over narration. Kurt Russell reading it or not, it plays like a “We need to make sense of the narrative, need to excuse the lame third act leap forward in time.” It’s crap, lazy filmmaking to boot.
3) The Sharon Tate as “The Marion Davies of Her Day,” an underrated comedienne, thesis. Davies was the comic actress and Hearst mistress slandered by Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane.” As the scenes from “The Wrecking Crew” sampled here show, Tate was an awkward and obvious actress — not quite amateurish, not exactly skilled at even the basics. Tarantino had already inserted Rick Dalton into “The Great Escape.” He might have sold his Tate thesis had he parked Robbie in “The Wrecking Crew.” She can act. And like Tarantino, I liked Dean Martin Matt Helm movies…when I was 8. They’re garbage. Tate didn’t deserve her fate, but her savviest career move was marrying that creep Polanski. Which accidentally sealed her fate.
4) Pointless jump cuts. How very “French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague” of him.
5) Women’s feet, the dirtier the better.
6) Endless, overlong driving shots. In his mythic La La Land, LA had no smog and none of the traffic that created it. Just vintage cars weaving in and out of the sparse other vintage motors at their unhurried leisure. It sets the pace of the picture, which is funereal.
7) Slurping. Everybody slurps. And don’t get me started on the endless throat-clearing. Excusing your own gaucherie, QT?
8) Shortchanging The Spaghetti Western experience that Rick dives into. A third act afterthought? Oh yeah. That’ll be in the FOUR hour cut of the picture.
9) Over-accuracy in recreating the mass production junk that was the Golden Age of TV Westerns. Close your eyes and just listen to “Lancer” scenes as they are performed. I did when I dropped back in on an hour or so of the film, hearing it anew on second viewing. This is dreadful, tin-eared horse opera scribbling. Luke Perry, BTW? Rest in peace, but God, he looks uncomfortable and sounds out of place here, an actor in the “pilot” who’d be recast if the show is picked up?
10) Slandering the memory of Bruce Lee. He wasn’t the saint portrayed in Rob Cohen’s “Dragon,” but I’ve never run across any suggestion he was a late 60s Hollywood douche. Having old white guy stunt conservative Cliff Booth “teach him a lesson” is laughable, reactionary and maybe a little racist. Conservative fans of the picture eat that up, along with the harsh treatment of women and “hippies.”
Tarantino, breaking with the rest of Hollywood, which is kowtowing to the Chinese market and Chinese money? Is that why he did it?
That “ending” is worth its own “ten things I hated” all by itself, but I’ll leave that where it is. I dare say a BIG chunk of the audience seeing “Once Upon a Time…” won’t know much about the Manson Family (putting Lena Dunham in there seems so…apt) and Tate-LaBianca murders, and won’t be curious enough to learn the truth. Hollywood has always bastardized history, but I am NOT a fan of “Inglourious Basterdized” history. At all. In an era of fake news, burlesque fake history like this not quite the assault on the facts as proven that say “J.F.K.” was. But it doesn’t help.
People calling this the director’s “masterpiece” have probably been saying this for movie after movie since “Jackie Brown.” “Jackie Brown” is the one picture that still plays, and still deserves that label.
Emma Roberts, Amy Madigan, Betty Gilpin and nine others wake up in the woods, ready to be hunted. Or not ready.
A taste of “The Most Dangerous Game?” Sept.27, we will find out.
I can’t help but notice that a lot of movies that either make no noise in theaters or don’t even warrant a theatrical release find fresh “new” titles when they make their way to Netflix.
Thus, “#SquadGoals” evolves into “Deadly Scholars” on the streaming service.
It’s a tricky-enough but drably executed serial-killer-in-high-school thriller that flirts with issues of press freedom, official coverups, police indifference and callous classmates on its way to resolution it only half earns.
“#SquadGoals” is the name of a blog enterprising teen reporter Samantha (Kennedy Lea Slocum of TV’s “The Kids are Alright” and “The Real O’Neals”) runs at Westbrook High. It’s all about the seniors, as is her effort to interview every single “squad” member for the yearbook before graduation.
She’s a bit of a budding theater critic, too. She and snarky photographer friend Nate (Corey Fogelmanis of “Ma”) are all set to enjoy — or talk smack about — the school’s “Romeo & Juliet.”
“Angela IS Juliet! She plays comatose really well!”
But that retching that dreamy Romeo does after taking the same poison that brought down his love? That’s not acting. Dude dies right there on the stage.
It’s the first “mysterious” death at the charter school. And the red alert control-freakout Principal Pope (Sherri Saum) goes into afterwards — “No one is to talk to the media” — convinces Sam that even if the cops aren’t suspicious, maybe she should be.
“That’s something you say when you’re trying to cover something up…My Spidey sense is tingling.”
“Twin Peaks” alumna Sheryl Lee plays Sam’s mom, the school’s mental health (grief) counselor, ineffectual, and constantly bullied by the “I want to know FIRST” damage controlling principal.
Sam, Nate and pal Rudy (Peyton Clark), smart kids all up for the same big scholarship, decide to dig into things on their own.
Because the first death in the “squad” isn’t the last.
There’s mystery without a lot of suspense, as we’re tipped far too obviously and far too early as to what might be playing out. The script doesn’t play fair in a few cringe-worthy ways, the “surprises” feel random.
How can you tell a movie is malnourished in production money? Cheerleaders’ cheers that don’t seem choreographed. Or rehearsed. A psychology teacher who doesn’t know how to pronounce “grandiosity” and doesn’t get a second take to get it right.
Because nobody else on the set does, either. Actors.
The whole enterprise is more “Murder She Wrote” rerun than bonafied “dead teenager movie.” The deaths, save for Romeo’s, are poorly handled and barely set up at all.
Nobody really “has it coming.” t
And the budding teen romance is undone by the hints that maybe the guy character we’re pairing with the girl character is more into other guys.
I’ve seen worse, but then, I see everything. Maybe this is one you want to skip.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Paris Berelc, Kennedy Lea Slocum, Alexa Mansour, Eric Stanton Betts, Corey Fogelmanis , Sherri Saum
Credits” Directed by Danny J. Boyle, script by Caron Tschampion. A Marvista/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:27
“Cold Case Hammarskjöld” is a documentary that invites the viewer down another rabbit hole with the quixotic Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger.
His “Red Chapel” was a playful plunge behind the bamboo curtain in North Korea, with Brügger and an accomplice posing as two Danish comedians on a cultural exchange mission, rooking the Koreans into letting them see what their isolated, repressive state was really like.
Here, Brügger plays an investigative journalist. He tags along for six years in the quest of an amateur sleuth as they try to discover what really happened when crusading do-gooder U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld‘s plane went down on the border of Congo and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in September of 1961.
The two hour+ film Brügger carved out of this detours into vast conspiracies and stony official silences that reek of “cover-up,” of the Africa of Angola and assassination, AIDS genocide and white supremacy, Mozambique and mining corporation-backed murders — at the highest level.
Early on, he shows us the gear he and Göran Björkdahl, the son of a man who collected a piece of Hammarskjöld’s plane that he passed on to him, are packing to take to Ndola, the remote airport where Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed. Two shovels, two white pith helmets “to protect our pale Scandinavian skin” from the African sun, and two Cuban cigars for when they “celebrate” digging up the plane and finding the “smoking gun” that makes their case.
It’s not a spoiler to say Brügger lights up the cigars. What the viewer has to do is decide if this dogged but credulous and easily sidetracked filmmaker should ever have struck the match.
“I know for a fact that the villain of this story, he only wore white,” he says by way of introduction. His conceit for how he presents his evidence, how he and Björkdahl feel confident in naming names and reaching conclusions, is by telling the story of the film in two hotel rooms.
In Cape Town, South Africa and Kinshasa, Congo, the director/narrator/provocateur dresses in white to emulate “the villain” and dictates his tale to a couple of African secretaries typing on old fashioned manual typewriters.
It is either “the world’s biggest murder mystery or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory,” he admits, addressing them, us and the wall he’s covered with a documentary filmmakers’ friend — Post-it notes.
He uses animation to recreate the crash and scenes his assorted witnesses describe. Brügger and Björkdahl travel over much of Southern Africa, interviewing surviving black African witnesses (who were ignored or discounted at the time), fleshing out the life’s work of Hammarskjöld, lauded as “The world’s first ‘public servant,'” at one memorial service.
Brügger notes the ways the U.N. and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have come out and said they’re pretty sure Hammarskjöld was assassinated. They gather names, lists, address books and documents from a shadowy enterprise called the South African Institute for Maritime Research.
And every so often, a secretary — Saphir or Kerryn — will stand up for the film and for the viewer with an interruption of this meandering, teased out tale.
“That’s a lot of names. I’m confused,” one woman will complain.
“Are you going to talk about the deeper story? About Apartheid” the South African Kerryn will ask.
At another point, Saphir leans back from the typewriter as if she’s solved a puzzle.
So that’s “why this became fiction,” she declares!
The frustrated Brügger mutters, “This is not fiction. This is a documentary
But is it? Really?
At several points, anybody with any experience of the law or journalism will see how credulous these two are in the ways they decide who is credible and who is “lying.”
Showing a key witness a hand-written “fictional” memoir by that named “villain” and saying, “This is his handwriting, right?” is laughable.
So is the lone phone chat they have with this American “Rambo” like figure who might be connected with what happened. “Go find out who killed Kennedy,” he jokes. “Do something important!”
Then there’s the Ndola airport official who says they can dig there for the buried plane wreckage. They want “all of it?”
“But…you only have two shovels!”
What isn’t funny is the fact that suddenly, permission is dig up that wreckage is yanked. It’s not funny that British Intelligence and the U.S. CIA won’t release information they have — transcripts of a fighter pilot’s chatter intercepted that night, etc.
And seeing Hammarskjöld’s bloodied body, with what looks like a playing card tucked under his collar (A CIA calling card?), recognizable when mysteriously every other body in the crash was burnt to a crisp, perhaps to hide bullet holes from a fighter jet?
The most credible witnesses who knew the Belgian mercenary fighter pilot in question, the pilot’s widow who blurts out, “Oh, not that Hammarskjöld nonsense again” when they ambush her?
Yes, we can believe that powerful people, rapacious capitalists and their Cold Warrior allies wanted this guardian of young African democracies silenced. The CIA was particularly assassination happy back then.
At some point, tumbling into the white supremacist subterfuge of Apartheid Era South Africa, Brügger loses the thread, or at least introduces too much information to himself and to the movie.
Sometimes, just a chapter heading will suffice — “Chapter XII, The Evil that White Men Do.”
In the end, perhaps it is less important that “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” finds or doesn’t find its “smoking gun,” or that it makes or doesn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even if he’s not a journalist — he’s playing one, much as he played a Libyan Ambassador to poke around in the “blood diamond” trade in “The Ambassador” — Brügger forces us to remember an almost-forgotten crusader and compells us to wonder just what is being kept from us by government agencies who know where the bodies are buried, and who — back then — provided the shovels.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Mads Brügger, Göran Björkdahl, Dag Hammarskjöld
Credits: Written and directed by Mads Brügger. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 2:04
Storm Reid and Mykelti Williamson are the big names in this tale of a murdered family that will not let go of a surviving member.
It opens on the last weekend of August, a dumping ground where a promising horror title can stand out as counter programming.
Looks cute, with social commentary built in.
August 20, this festival favorite hits VOD.
You don’t even have to shoot in color. A little VR start up wants to let you see the world through someone else’s eyes. Empathy is to be the byproduct.
Zack Robidas, Kathy Searle and Nat Klaitz star in it.
The trailer that won the Super Bowl finally becomes a movie in the flesh this Thursday night.
Love the pairing of DJ and J. Stath, Idris makes a formidable villain.
I doubt of the cars upstage these lads, McLaren or no.
There’s no predicting how “Teacher” will play in the world wide cinescape. But it hit me. I found writer-director Adam Dick’s debut feature relentlessly disturbing on all sorts of levels. And no, that won’t be to every taste.
He and star David Dastmalchian –;of TV’s “MacGuyver,” “Ant Man and The Wasp,” and Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming big screen version of “Dune” — create one of the most serrated cinematic portraits of bullying, the ways it tears through a school and scars for life.
It traffics in tropes and stereotypes, ups the ante on the extremes its bullies go to and yet never seems, at any point and in any way, removed from reality.
This is our world, a daily dose of cruelty doled out by the insensate. Here’s a movie that carves “Hurt people hurt people” into the heart and rarely lets us off the hook as it does.
Dastmalchian is Mr. Lewis, teaching Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” to juniors at Prairie Trail High in suburban Chicago. He has the spectacles, the too-flat hair and the sensitivity that mark him as the quintessential nerd. Yes, the film’s prologue shows us, he was bullied as a child, even as he was dealing with a violently unhappy home life.
Bitter? His new divorce barely scratches the surface of that. Anger management issues, a drinking problem — the last thing this guy needs is to see his own haunted life relived by his less fortunate students.
Daniela (Esme Perez) is pointlessly taunted for her race and her shyness, which manifests itself in the halting way she reads from the play in class.
Preston (Matthew Garry) is the kid the jocks pick on in class, on the bus and in the cafeteria. He’s a smart student, a photographer, and that doesn’t seem to help.
Because Tim Cooper (Curtis Edward Jackson), the sociopathic high-born star pitcher of the baseball team won’t let it — or them — be.
“Teacher” sees Mr. Lewis struggle to intervene as Tim escalates their torment in a waking nightmare of beatings, social media shaming and intimidation.
Mr. Lewis is up for tenure, but still he speaks out. Not that his principal (Cedric Young) is much help. “Everything’s fine,” he says. “This isn’t Kafka.”
But later, as everything is even less fine and things seem more Kafkaesque, he pleads — “We need to hang on until summer! Please work with me!”
Because Mr. Lewis, in trying to rein in Tim’s reign of terror, runs him afoul of the brute’s rich, well-connected father. Kevin Pollack is a decent dramatic actor (“A Few Good Men”) and one of the most gifted comic impressionists of our time. But as Bernie Cooper, he is menace incarnate.
Violent? We can’t say. Threatening? Always. Pollack underplays the obvious tells that Dick slips into the script, a rich guy used to getting his way letting on that he knows all about Lewis, his situation and the screws he can turn to get lenience and special treatment for a son he probably realizes is a thug, because he was raised to be “tough” on his inferiors.
Dick, fleshing out a short film he made with this title and on this subject a couple of years back, suggests two might-be-romances. Daniela and Preston are in the foxhole together, awkwardly facing the pitiless piling-on of teenagers who are all too eager to reward the bullies for not picking on them. They will bring you to the verge of tears.
And Lewis might find a kindred spirit in fellow teacher Arabella (Helen Joo Lee), whose surface sparkle gives a hint of the brittle underneath, letting on that the reasons she might find James Lewis interesting are things she has in common with him.
Because Dastmalchian never quite lets us root for the guy. We can twitch and empathize with James, even if we don’t sympathize with him. “Bitter…sweet” his only pal on the faculty (John Hoogenakker) says of him.
His ex describes the “mood swings, violence and drinking” that made her give up on James. And Dastmalchian plays the guy as so on edge that the real shocks here aren’t his bubbling rage and narrated thoughts of acting out. It’s when he repeatedly tries to understand the perpetrators, mediate the conflicts and keep the peace that he makes your jaw drop.
A very good actor makes us see the strain all this puts on a loner whose lifelong humiliation never ended.
“They say we can never go home again,” he narrates. “In truth, we never leave.”
The cleverest thing Dick tries and almost succeeds in pulling off is teasing out the viewer’s desire for revenge, of Preston (with only a camera for a weapon) and later social media savvy James, and then upending that craving as if his movie is a “teachable moment.”
When James complains that he’s but a “bark in the dark” when he rants about the sociopathy and cruelty overwhelming a society that rejects “‘After School (Special)’ warm fuzzies,” he might be talking about “Teacher” itself.
I found it so real it leaves bruises.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violent, sexual content, alcohol abuse
Cast: David Dastmalchian, Kevin Pollack, Esme Perez
Credits: Written and directed by Adam Dick. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:40
Movie Nation 