Eye rolling is against doctor’s orders. For some of us.”
“Sharpen your stakes because #Marvel is rebooting the #Blade franchise with Mahershala Ali https://t.co/oaXkaCD6UN https://t.co/ArnkCKrVkP https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1153213606894407680?s=17
Entertainment Weekly saves us all $14 a head.
Who says magazines are irrelevant?
“There’s a clear standout performance in #TheLionKing remake and it’s not Beyoncé.”
https://t.co/4joPRFP0js https://twitter.com/EW/status/1153093567767830528?s=17
You’ve got a good thing going. The picture is clicking. Kind of. The stars have chemistry. OK, a little bit.
The bad guys are SCARY. And mouthy.
Because the dialogue? It’s got bite.
“You’re messing up my life!”
“What life? You collect records and KILL people!”
But the odd lapse in logic, here and there, doesn’t prepare us for the loopy, dopey, drooping finale to “Love Shot,” a hit-man romance set “Once upon a time in Koreatown.”
That’s the hook in writer-director Steven Fine’s amiable, if violent, action rom-com. Everybody is all about Koreatown — Korean mobsters, Korean doumi “karaoke hostesses,”Korean BBQ.
“Try the BiBimBap!”
“Can we get some soju?”
Mobsters are fighting over who can land the right TV contest-winning chef for their Koreatown restaurant, and nobody is going to outfox the Jewish mobster Tony (John Kapelos, a veteran character actor immortalized as the “cokehead” investment advisor Barry on “Seinfeld”).
Tony’s got a numbnuts assistant (Cruz Kim) who is always mistaking the boss’s intention, always a step behind the boss in conversation. They look at video of a mob massacre in an eatery Tony has subsequently taken over. One minute, he’s wondering who this “VERY professional triggerman” is, the next, whether or not he can keep the chef on after this violent night.
“Wonder if he’s got a signature dish?” A pause for Slim (Kim) to figure out who he’s talking about. “The CHEF!”
The movie’s about the triggerman. Max (Dakota Loesch of “Buzzkill” and “Scraper”) is a soul and funk fanatic. Forget the unkempt stubble, the omni-present hitman’s black stocking gap, the gapped teeth. Or at least look past them.
The most lovely 60s-90s soul is seeping through the ear buds. A stranger on the street (Amy Tsang) recognizes The Turner Brothers. They end up taking the same commuter train. He dozes off, she leaves her number.
And wouldn’t you know it? Max’s next job, the tiny red dossier he’s handed at a Korean convenience store, along with a fresh pack of cigarettes, is a picture of her — Karen.
Max is to “hit” this woman whose soul-music loving soul makes her his soul mate. Or so he thinks.
He sees and hears her at a karaoke bar, where she’s a doumi (sometimes spelled “domi”), a karaoke bar-girl/hostess, your “company for the night,” singing to you, drinking with you, encouraging you to run up a tab.
But when Max asks her out, he decides to come clean. It wasn’t fate or “kismet” that sent him to that bar. Who, exactly, wants her dead? And would she like to come over and listen to his record collection while they figure that out and he protects her from her fate?
“I met you, and it was like gettin’ shot — shot in the stomach. Now I’ve got this heaviness there and I don’t want it to go away.”
The whole set up, kind of “High Fidelity” meets “Grosse Point Blank,” to go all Cusack in high concept-ese, is so cute you want to pinch its cheeks.
Tsang (“Shameless”) has a beguiling mystery about her. I don’t know for sure that the crackling, sultry Patti Smith voice she “sings” her sultry “I Think We’re Alone Now” in is actually her voice. But I hope so.
Loesch is merely OK in their scenes together, trying to impress her with his music, his quick-draw (acted out in the mirror). His real chemistry is with Kapelos.
Hit-man movies are a genre unto themselves, and “Love Shot” relies on decades of tropes — Max stalking quarries who carry 1980s style aluminum drug dealer briefcases, Max scoping out Karen through the scope of his sniper rifle.
Writer-director Fine struggles to make this murdering — there is blood, one grisly strangling — cute. We can root for Max (kind of) as he finally meets a contract he cannot carry out.
His low-voiced exchange of questions, obfuscations and threats with the Korean Koreatown mobsters who wrote the contract, all his contracts, “10 years and nothing” but the hits, has a tetchy edge.
“You can’t get rid of me. I know too much.”
“You don’t talk to us like that!”
On the way out, the mass murderer stops to compliment the chef — “That was a great job with the bibimbap!”
Tsang gives a wary fatalism to Karen. She takes the news that there’s a contract on her as an insult. But thinking for a second further, she accepts it at face value. She knows something, worries she might have it coming.
Karen and Max keep secrets from each other.
The stylistic highlight is a recreation of a doumi hostess confrontation that might play into why Karen has been targeted, a wordless scene with music playing behind it, threats of violence in her gestures and actions.
Kapelos has his finest moment in one of several scenes where Tony plays up his Jewishness, a pissing match with a business rival where fate is tied to a spin of the dreidel.
Max lies about his affection for his new “boss” Tony — “Total mensch. Love’em.”
Tony is touched by Max’s “one last job” promise, giving it all up for the love of a good woman.
“A romantic ronin!” Tony exults, and then ruins it by repeating himself. “How romantic.”
But getting back to the resolution of this all, the finale that seems unearned, tacked on, with characters exhibiting cunning that nothing they’ve done before prepares us for. I mean, Karen seems like an in-the-moment flake, teetering from one mistake to the next.
Max? He has a life, or so this close-but-no-cigar hitman rom-com would have us believe. We, like Karen, know better.
“What life? You collect records and KILL people!”
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity
Cast: Dakota Loesch, Amy Tsang, John Kapelos, Cruz Kim, Victor J. Ho
Credits: Written and directed by Steven Fine. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:21
Cardi B gets billed above Senora Jennifer Lopez on this trailer, at least.
J Lo shows a girl how it’s done.
Madeline Brewer, Keke Palmer, Constance Wu, Julia Stiles, Mercedes Ruehl, Usher, Frank Whalley…
Sept. 13.
The “news” about what should prove to be the biggest blockbuster of the fall is that Warners set a new record for the number of gallons of fake blood used on a film with this second half/sequel.
Old school huxtering. Gotta love it.
From Ty Burr, even though I am not alone in wishing I had tweeted it first.
Amen.
“This is the exact opposite of why I got into this business.” https://t.co/j1dqPUYaKw https://twitter.com/tyburr/status/1152784807379775488?s=17
A $192 million plus weekend let “The Lion King” pass a later Harry Potter picture to take the all time July opening week record.
A big Thursday and huge Friday pushed it there, with a Sat fall off letting it flirt with $200 million.
“Avengers’ Endgame” passed “Avatar* as the biggest hit of all time, in unadjusted dollars.
“Lion King” mirrored that success overseas, and even though adults like it more than kids — not as cute, funny, etc. as the animated classic it is based on — it secures Jon Favreau’s status as a Disney go-to director.
Not that anything we see in this photo real animation looks or sounds as it it was “directed .”
“Spider-Man: Far from Home” took a plunge to about $20, “Toy Story 4” tailed off steeply to the low teens.
“Crawl” is doing fine — another $5, “Stuber” is plunging.
“Yesterday” is still holding audience like the sleeper hit it is. Closing in on $60 million and $75 is within reach.
“The Art of Self-Defense” didn’t dent the top ten in wide (ish) release.
https://deadline.com/2019/07/the-lion-king-weekend-box-office-july-records-1202648944/
A rainy night, a frantic dash into a phone booth a car circling — pursuing. Strings on the soundtrack urge us on.
A woman, pursued. Hiding in a rest stop toilet, breaking into a car.
A guy in a rainproof hoodie, the flash of a blade, a narrow escape. Or not?
“Secret Obsession” is the stuff pure hokum is made of. It’s a humdrum and solidly unsurprising “a woman stalked” thriller, and about the best thing you can say about it is that the leads got to be leads for a change, and that hey, string players need the work — even in Hollywood.
We can hear “I’ll love you forever…and a DAY!” promised on the soundtrack as we ponder the hospitalization and recovery of Jennifer, played by Brenda Song of “The Social Network” and TV’s “Station 19” and “Pure Genius.”
She survived that opening scene, but barely. Nurse Masters (Ashley Scott) is concerned, and blunt.
Because Jennifer’s husband, Russell (Mike Vogel of TV’s “The Brave” and “The Case for Christ”) has shown up.
“My wife was in a car accident.”
“Sir, you CAN’T go in there!”
Her injuries including head trauma. There’s…amnesia.
Russell is handsome, his designer glasses and perfectly-trimmed stubble underlining that he’s “professional” and “concerned.”
Or, you know, a “Lifetime Original Movie” stalker. Serial killer, maybe.
He questions his wife, and he starts explaining — their romance, their life together.
Just. Like. “The Notebook.” Awwwwww.
She keeps smiling, obviously appreciating the life she leads at the “been in the family for years” remote (Pomona) mansion, but frowning in puzzlement when his back is turned.
And sex? Recoiling in terror seems to work
Dennis Haysbert is the long-in-the-tooth detective whose “obsession” with this case is no secret. He’s “compensating,” as they say in Writing Screen Cops 101, “atoning” for an earlier failing. The chief knows. The chief always does.
“Whatever you do won’t make up for what happened…When was the last time you took a day off?”
“This was no accident!”
Jennifer sneaks around, hunts for her phone and picks up hints and clues that something isn’t kosher in Pomona, California.
The detective keeps raising his eyebrow as he computer-searches while driving. I think that’s illegal.
The script, by Kraig Wenman and director Peter Sullivan, gives away its “surprises” with ridiculous ease. They decided to go for suspense instead. Abandoning mystery hurts their case, even if they manage some tense moments as Jennifer makes the Heroine’s Journey from pretty but passive pawn to proactive “How do I get out of this?”
But drawn out? My stars and garters! This is a 60 minute episode (52 plus commercials) of a hundred episodic TV plots dating back to the ’60s, padded and padded — always underscored with urgent strings — to 1:37.
It’s good that everybody, including Netflix, is leaping into that “Crazy Rich Asians” driven “Let’s try to tell more stories with Asian characters/actors” trend. Song has screen presence and has earned her shot, and Haysbert is criminally underemployed.
But “Secret Obsession” never looks like anything more than the quick, cheap and under-developed hack job that it is.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Brenda Song, Mike Vogel, Dennis Haysbert
Credits: Directed by Peter Sullivan, script by Kraig Wenman and Peter Sullivan. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:37
I can’t say I saw this as “a series” when a friend loaned me the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic n./comic book many moons ago.
But when the movie is sort of right but not quite…it’s the natural way of things for cable or streaming (“Catch-22” for instance, “Dune”) to take a fresh shot at it.
So here we are.
The cast has a few highlights, dazzling names, but is overall, underwhelming. At least on paper.
Radicalization via run-ins with the State and its suspicions about his associations, recruitment, notoriety, TV “popularization” that turns into global infamy.
Britain’s “Jihadi John,” TV beheader, explored and maybe…explained? July 31?
Movie Nation 